


The Lodger

by mad_martha



Series: The Lodger Series [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, Drama, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-03
Updated: 2011-07-03
Packaged: 2017-10-20 23:58:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 44,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/218544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mad_martha/pseuds/mad_martha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after Voldemort's death and the end of the war, a lonely and alienated Harry Potter decides to take in a lodger.  The result isn't quite what he anticipated.  He has more in common with his new housemate than he expected, and together they learn to look life – and the wizarding world - in the face again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first Harry Potter story I wrote, posted originally in December 2002, well before "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" was released.
> 
> I owe thanks to Madambeetroot and Damkina who brainstormed madly with me one weekend, the result of which was this story - and, therefore, my whole career in the Harry Potter fandom :-)

It was raining outside.  Droplets hit the multi-paned windows and slid down the glass, at first unhurriedly and then with increasing force and speed.

Harry Potter watched the rain on the glass and the scuttle of people in the street outside with something that bordered upon apathy.  Some of the people had umbrellas, but many hadn't and it seemed that the wizarding world had yet to devise a spell for keeping oneself dry in the rain.

"Mr Potter?"

He looked up into the bright, curious eyes of the letting agent.  She was looking at him expectantly and holding out a goose-feather quill.

"If you'd just like to sign, Mr. Potter ...."

"Of course.  I'm sorry."  The polite apology came automatically to his lips, and he even managed to dredge up a smile for her that he was far from feeling.  It was an ingrained reflex; Ron often told him that he was too good-natured and nice to people for his own good.

Harry signed the papers and the agent took them back.  She was quite a young witch, a little over-awed at having the Great Harry Potter sitting before her desk, and was prattling cheerfully to cover her nerves.  None of Harry's attempts to reassure her had been successful.

"That's lovely, Mr. Potter.  You leave it to me and I'm sure I'll find someone suitable in no time at all ...."

Harry just managed to bite back a tart retort: _I wouldn't bet on that if I were you._   Instead, he smiled again rather drearily and stood up, shaking her hand.

After all, it wasn't her fault.  She would find out soon enough just what a problem the name _Harry Potter_ was.  Oh, he was sure she would find plenty of people keen to rent a room – until the first mention of the owner's name, which was guaranteed to make most prospective lodgers back away, dismayed, and look elsewhere.

Leaving just the kind of people he _didn't_ want lodging with him.

Harry sighed inwardly as he stepped out onto the street, and hunched his shoulders against the rain.  He was one of those people who didn't have an umbrella, but he ignored the wet and walked slowly up Diagon Alley with his hands dug into the pockets of his jeans.  He had stopped dressing like a wizard most of the time now, since wearing robes didn't garner him any less stares.  Nobody bothered him for looking like a Muggle.

Half the wizarding world avoided him like the plague, not wanting to 'disturb' its greatest hero.  The other half had a prurient curiosity about him that drove him crazy and nothing seemed to dispel.  Harry wasn't sure which attitude annoyed and depressed him more.

Still, he had promised Hermione that he would try the lodger idea.  She thought it would be company for him; Hermione worried about Harry a great deal.  He wished she wouldn't.

 

*

 

The house Harry lived in was on the edge of a Muggle village in Somerset.  It had originally belonged to Sirius Black, in that all too brief period between his being declared innocent and his death in the last battle against Voldemort and his followers.  The entire Black estate had been willed to Harry who, as Sirius's godson, was the only person he claimed as family.  If he had any living blood relatives, Harry hadn't been able to trace them.

The house was a five-bedroomed detached property with a large garden.  It had briefly been used as the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix near the end of the war, and Harry had lived there with a handful of friends for a few months after that, until the upheaval had died down and they all found places of their own to live.

The vague hope that Ron at least – the last to leave – would stay with him had died when the redhead announced his engagement to Hermione.  Harry had done all the right best friend things; congratulated the couple, helped them organise the wedding, arranged Ron's stag night and made sure he made it home safely and in time for the wedding afterwards, acted as best man and saw the pair off into their new life together.  Then he did the most important thing any best friend could do in the circumstances; he backed off and let them live their own lives together without interference.

Now Harry lived in his house alone.  It was a quiet and often difficult existence for him.

He had many of the things most people aspired to; a home of his own, money, fame, friends.  And yet, when he added it all up, it seemed to come to very little of any actual value.  He had never wanted the fame, which was a bitter thing, empty of warmth.  Money could only buy material goods, and friends had their own lives to lead.  And now he was about to open his home to who knew what.

Padding around the house on silent feet, Harry wondered what prospective lodgers would make of the place.  His early years with the Dursleys had left him with a dislike of clutter which, to Harry, just meant more things to clean and dust.  But most of the contents of the house, things like furniture, paintings and ornaments, had been bought by Sirius, and he couldn't bring himself to get rid of any of it. 

In the period when Ron and the others had lived here, he had been forced to clear out Sirius's bedroom and the one used by Remus Lupin in order to make room for everyone, but the gear had all been stowed away in trunks in the attic.  It was still there now.  Harry had been unable to summon the mental energy to deal with it, and after Ron left he derived a morose kind of comfort from occasionally going up there and sorting through the boxes, turning over and touching his godfather's belongings.  Part of him knew this was morbid, but another, larger part didn't care.  There had been a time when doing things like that had been all that got him through the days.  He was afraid to admit to himself, let alone anyone else, just how close he was to feeling like that again.

But one person who couldn't be fooled was Hermione, and so the lodger idea had been conceived.  She had been nagging Harry to do it for months now, convinced that it would be company for him and give him something else to think about.  Harry, on the other hand, had been considering acting lessons, as it was obvious that his attempts to seem cheerful and well-adjusted in front of his friends were backfiring spectacularly. 

It was humiliating to realise that he was somehow telegraphing his depression and loneliness to his friends.  He didn't _want_ them to worry about him like this and if he could have stopped visiting and socialising with them without causing yet more worry, he would have done so, just to stop the cycle of concern.

But he couldn't do that.  Totally aside from the offence it would cause the couple, Harry also knew he was simply too weak to do it.  Part of him craved the contact with them too much, no matter how much worse it made him feel afterwards.

Perhaps Hermione was right, he thought, as he stood in the middle of that room he intended to let and stared around blindly.  Perhaps having someone else in the house would give him something to focus upon, even if it was just the annoyance of having a complete stranger in his space.

Annoyance was better than not feeling at all.

 

*

 

"You owe me a Galleon," Ron told Harry, his freckled face creasing into a grin as his friend walked through the door.

"Daylight robbery, _I_ call it," Harry pretended to grumble.  He dug a hand into his pocket, found a gold coin and pulled it out, flipping it across to the redhead.  "Since when have the Cannons started winning?  _And_ against Pride of Portree?"

"Hey, this is a new era for the Cannons!  A renaissance …."

"A fluke more like!"

"Don't start!" Hermione warned them both, amused, as she walked out of the kitchen.  She gave her husband a gentle prod in the ribs.  "You're setting the table.  Jump to it."

"I lead a hell of a life," Ron commented in a stage whisper to Harry.

"You're looking pretty well on it," was Harry's observation as his friend quickly ducked into the kitchen.

He and Hermione looked at each other for a moment when Ron had left.  There were probably even less secrets between the two of them than there were between Hermione and Ron, which seemed like an odd state of affairs to Harry.

"I took your advice," he told her.

"About the lodger?"  She smiled when he nodded.  "Good.  It's got to be better than you rattling around in that huge house on your own, you know."

"I don't know about that," he replied dryly.  "We'll see what turns up.  If anyone _does_ turn up, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if no one does."

"Don't be so pessimistic!"  Hermione tucked her hand affectionately through his arm.  "Come and have some dinner, and talk Quidditch with Ron.  He's been dying to discuss that game with someone, and Fred's been in Amsterdam all week."

"How is Fred these days?" he asked.

Harry's concern was genuine; things had been difficult for Fred Weasley for a while after George had been killed in the final battle against Voldemort.  Not that things had been any less difficult for Ron, really, for the family had lost Arthur and Percy too, but losing his twin had badly unbalanced Fred for a while.  _Like losing one of his legs,_ Charlie Weasley had observed at one point, _he always took it for granted until it was gone._ Harry suspected that had Fred not already been married to Angelina with two small children, he might have done something desperate.  As it was, it had taken the most ebullient Weasley some time to recover himself, although these days he continued the joke shop business on his own and with considerable skill.  The chain of shops was sprinkled across Europe and he was talking about opening a branch in the US shortly.  Harry was a major investor in the company.

"He's fine," Hermione said.  "Very busy, and never at home.  I'm surprised Angelina doesn't read him the riot act about it.  Oh – and they're expecting another baby!"

"Really?"

"Yes - as you'd already know if you visited Molly more often."  Her tone was gently chiding.

Harry gave her a strained smile.  Visiting Molly Weasley meant seeing Ginny, and dealing with the pair of them together was … difficult.  He wished desperately that Ginny would meet someone else and stop getting her own and her mother's hopes up in vain.  He loved her dearly … as a sister.  Unfortunately, Ginny's feelings for him had never really outgrown her childhood crush, which could be really awkward and embarrassing.

He said as much to Hermione now, adding, "Can't you have a word with Molly?  She might listen to you."

"I've already tried," she replied apologetically.  "She … well, you know what she's like.  I don't think she'll believe it until you marry someone else."

"Which isn't very likely."  Harry shrugged and let it go.  Some things couldn't be changed, as he knew all too painfully well.  So he changed the subject instead.  "Something smells good - are you turning into one of those scary celebrity cooks in _Witch Weekly_?"

Hermione chuckled.  "No, it's all a sham - I'm a great believer in those little packets of mixes and seasonings they sell at the local grocers.  I can peel, chop and stir, but that's about it …."

Dinner was a friendly, informal meal around the kitchen table.  Harry insisted on helping to wash up; then Ron dragged him off to his poky little study to 'talk shop' for a while.

The study was, in fact, just an excuse for Ron to have a little room all to himself in the house where he could keep all the bits and pieces he liked to collect and generally be messy without retribution from the mistress of the house.  His father had been much the same, only with him it had been a garden shed; Harry could remember stealing an awe-struck peek inside Arthur Weasley's shed when he was sixteen.  Molly Weasley had caught him, but had just laughed and told Harry confidentially that every man needed a shed of his own.  Harry hadn't really understood what she meant until the day Ron dragged him into his study "for a private chat" and he'd actually seen all the junk his friend kept in there.

Somewhere, underneath all the magazines and books and Quidditch match programmes and odd gizmos Ron picked up in the course of his work, were a couple of battered old chairs; after a bit of excavation, he managed to find them.  It took much less rummaging for him to dig out the bottle of Ogden's Old Firewhisky and two glasses that resided permanently in the bottom drawer of his desk.

"For God's sake, don't tell Hermione I've got this in here," he said with some relish as he poured two heavy shots and handed one to Harry.

"You say that every time," Harry observed, "and I'm sure she already knows."

"Yeah, but she doesn't know _officially_ , and if someone tells her, she will.  And if she knows officially, she'll feel she has to say something to me about it."

Harry gave Ron a bemused look.  "I'm sure there's logic in that statement somewhere, but I'm damned if I can find it."

Ron rolled his eyes.  "It's obvious that _you're_ not married."

"If walking up the aisle means I'm going to start acting like a character out of _The Pink Panther_ , then I'm never going to do it."  He wrinkled his nose.  "Not that I was planning to anyway."

There was an odd silence during which Harry became aware that Ron was staring at him in a vaguely concerned manner.  Whether the vagueness was real or assumed was hard to say; there had been a time when clowning around had simply been the way Ron Weasley was, but since he'd become an Auror much of the amiable fool act was just that – an act.  Very few people knew just how sharp he really was, and Harry was one of the privileged, but even in his best friend's company Ron found it hard to drop the mask.

And sometimes he simply chose not to.

Whatever was on his mind tonight he kept to himself.  Instead, he took a quick swig of his drink, set the glass down on the surface of the desk, and picked up a small object that looked like a miniature trunk carved out of wood. 

"Here – this is what I wanted to show you."  He handed it over and Harry examined it warily.  In spite of it looking like wood the surface of the object felt oddly hairy, as though it was covered in animal skin, and there was an unpleasant smell coming from it.  The effect was quite creepy.

"What is it?"

"Well, you know that charm office workers use to shrink files for storage?"

"Whiz-Zip?"  Harry blinked a the little wooden trunk.  "Well, that explains the shape."

"Yeah, but this is nastier."  Ron chuckled when Harry put the thing down on the desk rather hastily.  "Don't worry!  You don't honestly think Hermione would let anything into the house that hadn't been de-activated, do you?"

"Hm.  Let's pass on that.  What makes this nastier?"

"Someone's adapted the charm to work on living creatures."

Harry stared.  "You've got to be kidding me.  How dangerous is that?"

Ron's smile slipped.  "Pretty dangerous.  It works maybe three times out of every five.  The other two fifths of the time – "  He tapped the little trunk with a finger.  "It's not nice.  The victim can get pretty screwed up in the process."

"The _victim_ – you mean someone has tried this on a person?"

"Not that I'm aware of, but I think that was the general intention, eventually."

Harry was staring at the trunk in open revulsion now.  "So was that ...?"

"It was a cat.  It's, um, an ex-cat now."

"Ugh!  Why on earth are you keeping it in here?"

"Oh, you know."  There was a hint of twinkle in Ron's solemn eyes.  "Paperweight?"

Harry regarded him in disbelief.  "The Firewhisky is the least of your problems.  If Hermione finds out you've got a zipped dead cat in here, I think you'll be sleeping in a tent on the lawn for a while."

Ron chuckled and pushed the macabre little box to one side.  "I'll take it back to the Exhibits Room tomorrow.  I just thought you might be interested."

"I am.  It's always good to know what the Death Eaters have in store for me next." 

He was only half-joking.  Voldemort might be dead, and with him most of his inner circle, but there were still plenty of dark wizards out there for whom Harry was top of the list as a potential target.  Ron swore it gave him premature grey hairs, especially since Harry refused to accept bodyguards, surveillance or anything but standard household security wards.  From the pained look on his face, he was thinking of this now.  Harry quickly changed the subject.

"So have you found a counter-charm for it yet?"

"Oh, the standard unzipping charm restores the subject.  But we haven't worked out a protective ward that'll work against it yet."  Ron drank the last of his whisky moodily.  "I wish – "

" _No_ , Ron."  Harry's tone was gentle but resolute.  "I will not tie myself up in additional security on the off-chance that something like this _might_ be used on me.  I refuse to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.  It was bad enough when Voldemort was alive."

"Exactly!  Harry, have you any idea what it would do to us – to all of your friends – if you survived that monster only to get picked off by one of the pathetic little twerps he left behind?"

Harry looked at him.  He knew exactly what his friends would do in that event; they'd mourn and get over it, and get on with their lives.  He wouldn't expect anything else of them.  In fact, he suspected that for many of them life would simpler if they didn't have Harry Potter to worry about.  Saying this would only send Ron into an outraged rant though.  So he shrugged. 

"I don't think it's likely.  They've had plenty of other opportunities over the last couple of years, after all.  I'm hardly in hiding."

"Don't remind me!" Ron snapped.  "Sometimes I think you want them to come after you."

He fell silent, visibly reining in his anger, but Harry said nothing.  What could he say?  To deny it would almost certainly sound false and would only set Ron off again.  And Harry didn't want Ron to know just how close to the truth his accusation was.

Sometimes it felt like he had so little purpose left in his life that it would be better if he just took himself out of it.  Fortunately, he had never yet contemplated that route seriously, but there was no denying – at least to himself – that if a Death Eater _did_ come after him, Harry would be dangerously ambivalent about his course of action.

Much had changed since the final confrontation.  While Voldemort might have lost the battle, he had in many ways won the war.  Too many had died – not just Ron's relatives and Sirius and Remus, but Dumbledore, McGonagall, Hagrid, and other old friends like Oliver Wood, Viktor Krum and Olympe Maxime, to name just a few.  And he had managed to break Harry Potter.  Not obviously, but in little ways that mostly didn't show but which were slowly taking their toll.  The wizarding world had picked itself up and carried on, but Harry was left still limping somewhere in its wake.

"What do you want me to say?" he asked finally, very quietly.  "Yes, come and lock my house up tighter than Gringotts?  Yes, set someone to shadowing my every move?  It's a waste of time and money."

"Your life is a waste of time?"  Ron's voice was starting to rise.

Harry winced, but wouldn't back down.  "I didn't mean that, and you know it.  But Ron – I'm just one man.  It would be tying up valuable resources that could and should be deployed elsewhere.  It's not like I'm the Minister of Magic or anyone really important!  I'm just - "  _I'm just a massive embarrassment._   He stopped himself quickly.

"Just what?" his friend demanded.  Unfortunately he knew Harry too well.  "Nobody?  You're not nobody, Harry.  You never have been."

"Oh, what?"  Harry scoffed.  "So I'm Harry Potter, big deal!  I survived Voldemort once by a sheer fluke and suddenly I'm some kind of icon to the wizard world."

"You survived him twice," Ron reminded him curtly.  "You got rid of him twice."

"And I say it again – big deal."  Harry was suddenly very pale and tight-lipped.  "What I did in the last battle was nothing special except stay alive long enough to strike the killing blow.  Everyone seems to forget that in order for me to get close enough to do that, scores of other people had to die.  And I wasn't the only person who could have done it, Ron – it could as easily have been you, or your mother, or Hermione or Cho Chang."

"It couldn't.  None of us could have got the old git's attention the way you did; he made the mistakes that he made _because_ you were Harry Potter – "

"Bollocks!"

There was a sharp rap on the door before the quarrel could escalate, and Hermione stuck her head around it.  "I hope you two aren't arguing," she told them sternly. 

The tension lessened almost at once, neither of them wanting to drag Hermione into it.  It would only upset her and end in a tongue-lashing for the pair of them.

Ron rolled his eyes.  "Would we?"

"Hm."  She gave them a suspicious look but let it go, instead peering disapprovingly at the clutter in the little room.  "Are you ever going to tidy this up?"

"Excuse me – this is _my_ room!" Ron said indignantly, while Harry chuckled.

"It smells like there's a dead animal in here – "

Genuine hilarity surged up in Harry and he hastily looked away, stuffing a knuckle between his teeth to stifle a laugh.

Ron bridled.  "Remind me to come and poke around _your_ work-room sometime and make snippy comments!"

"Anytime you like," she told him loftily, "so long as you don't blunder around and break anything."  She favoured her husband with a superior little smile and disappeared again, shutting the door on his spluttering outrage with a sharp _click_.

Harry took one look at his friend's face and began to laugh.

"Honestly!" Ron said indignantly.  "Women!  Do you think she saw the shot-glasses?"

 

*

 

Two days later Harry received a letter:

 _Dear Mr. Potter,_

 _I have received an expression of interest in the room you wish to let, and will be bringing the gentleman to view it just after 6.00 pm today, if this is not inconvenient for you._

 _Yours sincerely,_

 _Aurelia Gabelot_

 _Junior Letting Agent  
_

 _Woobles & Gidget_

 _Housing Agents_

 _56c Diagon Alley_

 

Harry read the note and sighed in resignation, folding it up and tucking it into the sleeve of his robes.  He just hoped that whoever it was turned out to be reasonably civilised.

 

*

 

He was running a little late when he arrived home that evening, all but falling out of his own fireplace at ten minutes to six.  It took him several minutes to organise himself; dumping his groceries in the kitchen, pulling off his Muggle-style jacket and switching the lights on.  It was late October and the evenings were growing chilly, so Harry left the fire burning merrily in the grate and put a kettle on the hob to heat, reasoning that whoever was going to turn up would probably appreciate hot tea or coffee.

Then he settled down to pace the kitchen nervously.

Promptly at five past six the doorbell rang.  This was a little unusual in the wizarding world, but it was generally considered politer for people on business to Apparate to the front door rather than Flooing straight into a client's living room.  Harry cast a quick glance around, wondering if he'd left anything remotely embarrassing lying about, then hurried to open the door.

The young agency witch was standing on the step, beaming.  Her companion was standing at the side of the door where the low hallway light didn't quite reach, and he was shrouded by a heavy cloak that gave Harry an uncomfortable moment as he remembered the garb of the Death Eaters.  He glanced at the man curiously, but couldn't make out any features in the gloom.  Meanwhile Miss Gabelot was prattling on nervously.

"Good evening, Mr. Potter, I hope this isn't too soon, but the gentleman is in rather a hurry to find somewhere and I thought …."

"No, it's fine."  Harry stepped back and the pair walked inside. 

The Death Eater impression receded when the common dark blue cloak was revealed in the light - only to return again full force when the man pushed his hood back to reveal silver-blond hair and handsome, angular features.

"Bloody hell!" Harry said involuntarily.

It was Draco Malfoy.

It was years since Harry had seen him.  His last clear recollection of his former schoolmate was from the Death Eater trials early in the war.  Malfoy stood trial himself but not before he'd testified against his father, and at his own hearing Dumbledore had vouched for him.  He'd been acquitted, but had refused to fall in on the other side and promptly vanished from sight. 

Harry hadn't thought much about him until now, other than to vaguely wonder if the blond youth had survived the war.  The press had convicted him even if the wizard courts hadn't, blackening his name beyond repair, and Malfoy wouldn't have been the first person to be lynched by the misguided vigilante gangs who made the horror of the war ten times worse.

He'd changed.  That much was obvious although Harry couldn't put a finger on what it was, other than the superficial changes of age, lost weight and nondescript clothing.  Something about his bearing and expression had also altered, something subtle but which Harry noticed because, oddly, he sometimes thought he saw a similar change in his own face when he glanced into the bathroom mirror.

He was still Draco Malfoy.  But this was not the boy Harry Potter had known at school.

For a moment the two of them stared into each other's faces, stunned, then Malfoy turned sharply to the witch.

"This isn't going to work," he told her sharply.  "You didn't tell me it was _Harry Potter._   What were you thinking of?"

Miss Gabelot was almost wringing her hands.  "I didn't ....  It wasn't ....  I mean, I didn't know what else to _do_ – "

To Harry's astonishment she threw him a pleading look, clearly expecting him to help her out.  He'd been on the verge of vehemently seconding Malfoy's statement (for crying out loud, _Draco Malfoy?_ ).  But Harry, ever the gentleman, couldn't ignore the panic on the woman's face.  He wasn't quite sure what the problem was, but he could quite see that she was new to her job and probably terrified that she'd made an unforgivable error.

"It's alright," he said calmly.  "You weren't to know."

Malfoy shot him an incredulous look.  " _Not to know?_   Are you mad?  Who in the world _doesn't_ know – "

"Look, you want a room, don't you?" Harry interrupted.  "Well, I have a room I'm letting out."

Malfoy continued to stare at him angrily.  "Don't be ridiculous.  Can you imagine what your legions of loyal friends, fans and supporters would have to say if I rented a room in your house?  Because if you can't, believe me - I can!"

Harry stared back at him.  "Then isn't it lucky that none of them live here?  I'm not planning to put an advertisement in the _Daily Prophet_ either, so you're probably safe."  He waited, but Malfoy was clearly unable to come up with a suitable retort to this.  So Harry gestured towards the stairs.  "Want to take a look?"

 

*

 

At one point the little witch managed to pull Harry to one side, whispering frantically that she was so sorry, she hadn't known what to do, it had been so _difficult_ finding this gentleman somewhere to live ....  It was Harry's private opinion that her employers were the most unprincipled pigs in the trade if they could drop a hot potato like this in a junior employee's lap and expect her to deal with it.  It didn't take a genius to work out why Draco Malfoy was a difficult customer, after all.  What Harry wasn't sure he understood was why he was looking for a room to rent in the first place.

The room in question was the big guest bedroom Dumbledore had stayed in once or twice.  It was pleasantly furnished and had an en-suite bathroom.  Digging his hands into his pockets, Harry watched Malfoy for a few minutes as he looked over it silently, then said "Well?"

Malfoy turned to look at him.  His face was as mask-like and inscrutable as it had been at his trial.  "Why did you set the rent so low?  Who were you expecting to turn up?"

Harry shrugged, a little surprised at the question.  "I'm not renting it out for the money.  And I didn't really expect anyone to turn up."

Miss Gabelot made a tiny sound of protest which both men ignored.  Malfoy seemed to be turning Harry's response over in his mind, silently digesting it.  From the look on his face Harry guessed that he wasn't buying it, although it was, in fact, the complete truth.

Finally he said, "All right."

Harry nodded.  "Good.  I'll give you a set of keys and you can move in whenever you like."

"Now?"  That was almost a challenge. 

When Harry raised a brow at him, Malfoy pulled a small package out of his pocket; a spell-shrunken bundle of luggage.  For a moment Harry was reminded of Ron's zipped cat.  For all he knew, Malfoy's parcel could include a zipped House-elf; the idea was almost funny. 

He nodded again.  "That's fine."  He turned to the relieved agent.  "Do you have the contracts?"

 

*

 

When Harry tumbled out of the living room fire, the first person he saw was Hermione sitting on the sofa with Crookshanks purring in her lap.  They both jumped up when Harry appeared, and Hermione quickly caught him before he fell over and dusted him down.

"Good heavens, Harry, I wasn't expecting you – "

"Is Ron home?" he interrupted quickly.

"No, not yet – "

"Good."  Very agitated, Harry paced a little at high speed, before stopping in front of his bewildered friend.  "I have a lodger."

"Oh!"  Hermione blinked at him.  "That's good news, isn't it?"

"I don't know.  That's why I want to talk to you.  He doesn't know I've come here; he's unpacking his stuff at the moment."

Hermione tried to get a grasp on this.  "You Floo'd out of the house without telling him you were going?  Well ... all right, it's your house, but I don't think I understand why."

Harry gave her a frantic look.  "It's Draco Malfoy."

 _"WHAT!"_ she shrieked.

"I know, I know!  It was a total surprise to me too – "

"A _surprise?_   That's an understatement!  I thought he must be dead or – or living in another country or something!  Harry, you haven't agreed to this?"  The last words came out almost in a wail.

He flapped his arms helplessly.  "Well – yes.  I didn't quite know what to do, the agent was in a complete state and – "

Hermione closed her eyes briefly, reminding herself that this was Harry Potter, a man who attracted lunatic situations like a danger-magnet.  "Please tell me you didn't go along with this just to get the letting agent out of trouble."

"Well ... not exactly."  He gave her a weak grin.  "It was surreal, Hermione – "

"That I can believe!"

" – He was different, somehow.  And he wasn't any easier with the situation than I was."

"Hm."  Hermione gave him a long look, trying to get her mind around the whole thing.  "Harry ... don't you realise how dangerous this could be?  Doesn't it seem just a little bit odd to you that you advertise for a lodger and the first person who turns up is Malfoy?  Why would he need to rent a room in your house, or anyone else's?"

"I don't know."  Harry frowned.  "I thought about that, but ... he was cleared at his trial, Hermione.  Dumbledore vouched for him personally, and I'd hate to think that the old man's judgement was off in any way.  Besides, like I said, there was definitely something different about him."

"Such as?"

"Well ... this is going to sound a bit stupid, but he looked like he was down on his luck."

She let out an exasperated gust of breath.  "Harry, you are the world's worst sucker for a sob story, I swear."

"He hasn't spun me one yet, and knowing Malfoy he probably won't."  Harry sighed and ran a hand through his hair, making it even more untidy than it was naturally.  "Look, I'd better be getting back before he wonders where I've gone.  I just wanted to tell you about him."

"What, so I'll know where to find your will if he murders you in the night?" she demanded.  "Oh Harry, be careful!"

He shot her a wry grin as he stepped into the fireplace.  "My middle name!  _Phoenix Lodge!_ "

And he was gone.  Exasperated, amused and concerned all at once, Hermione stuck her head up the chimney after him.

"I hope you realise Ron will be absolutely furious when I tell him!" she shouted.

 

*

 

"Keys," he said, handing them over.  He pointed to the door leading out into the vegetable garden.  "That's the back door; the one you came in by is the front.  I've keyed the Floo to you as well – that's in the living room."

Malfoy took the keys and pocketed them.  "Thank you."

Harry hesitated, then said, "I'd better show you stuff."  He pointed to the floor.  "Kitchen.  Obviously."

For the first time a touch of his old, sarcastic humour crossed Malfoy's face.  "Obviously."

"You're welcome to use plates, mugs, cutlery and so on, but I can't guarantee that you'll find much in the fridge.  Um ... I'm a bit of a bachelor in my eating habits.  Mostly I bring stuff home that's already cooked."  Harry crossed the room and opened a small door to one side.  "Laundry room.  You're welcome to use it, if you haven't made other arrangements."

He closed the door again and led the other man out of the kitchen and down the passage.  "Dining room ... living room ... study."  He hesitated again at this door.  "I didn't think ....  I'd better introduce you, in case he doesn't remember you."

"Who?"  Now Malfoy looked uneasy again.  "I got the impression you lived here alone."

"I do, so far as people are concerned anyway."  Harry opened the study door and walked in.  _"Lumos!"_   The room lit up and there was a sudden rustle in the corner.  "Fawkes?"

There was a soft _whoosh_ of feathers and movement, and a large, brilliantly plumaged bird seemed to float through the air to land on Harry's shoulder.  Rustling his wings, Fawkes the Phoenix settled himself and took a close, sharp look at the newcomer.

Malfoy took a step back.  "That's Dumbledore's bird."

"Yes.  When Dumbledore died, Fawkes came to live with me."  Harry glanced at Malfoy warily.  "Dumbledore didn't will him to me or anything, you understand.  He just turned up after the funeral."  Harry still had mixed feelings about this, but it wasn't like he had much say in the matter.  Fawkes had decided he was going to live with Harry and that was the end of the matter.

"Didn't you have an owl?"

"Hedwig?  Yes, she lives in my bedroom when she's not out and about."

"Any other surprise housemates I should know about?  House-elves, perhaps?"

"Good God, no!"  Harry was genuinely surprised.  "Why would I have a House-elf?"

Malfoy gave him a hooded-eyed look.  "I seem to remember one that was very fond of you."

Oh.  Harry was quiet for a moment, stroking Fawkes's breast feathers gently.  "If you mean Dobby, he was killed ... during the war.  He tried to defend Dumbledore when the Death Eaters broke into Hogwarts."

Silence.  Harry didn't want to look at Malfoy and find out what kind of expression this news had evoked.  Instead, he continued, "Well, he hasn't attacked you and he isn't bristling his feathers at you, so I assume that means Fawkes doesn't mind you being here.  Come on, I'll show you the rest of the house."

 

*

 

Harry had just finished showing Malfoy around the upper storey when there was a distant rattle in the chimneys, followed by the sound of quick footsteps in the living room.

"Harry!  _Harry!_   Where are you?"

Harry sighed.  "Here we go ...."  He walked out onto the landing just as Ron reached the bottom of the stairs.  "I'm here.  Hermione told you, did she?"

"There has to be some mistake – "  Ron stopped on the bottom step, looking up, and an incredulous expression crossed his face.

Harry glanced around and found Malfoy standing at his shoulder, his face shuttered as he looked down at Ron.  He turned back.

"As you can see, no mistake," he said dryly, "and if you make one move towards your wand, Ron, I swear I'll smack you into the middle of next week!"  Actually, he doubted he could do it, but the threat was enough to pull his friend up short.

"Harry!"

"Tell you what," Malfoy said curtly, "I'll just pack, shall I?"

"Yeah, you do that!" Ron snapped.

"Shut up, the pair of you!" Harry said irritably.  "Ron – in the kitchen _now_.  I will not argue with you on the stairs.  Malfoy – don't be stupid.  You just paid me a month's rent in advance, and I don't take money under false pretences."

"I told you they wouldn't like it," Malfoy pointed out acidly.

"So?  Whose house is this anyway?"

He had to push Ron into the kitchen.  The redhead was almost speechless with anger; almost, but not quite, unfortunately.

"You are the living end!" he exploded, as soon as Harry had shut the door.  "Do you have a death wish or something?  That's _Draco Malfoy!_ "

"You noticed that too?" Harry retorted calmly.  "Good.  I thought maybe I was hallucinating."  He began to put the kettle on and search for the teabags.

"Don't get clever with me, Harry!  His father was _executed_ , for crying out loud – "

"Yes, and on Draco's evidence.  I _was_ at the trial, you know.  Both of them, in fact."

Ron stared at him in disbelief.  "So that makes it all right?  Dumbledore stands up and says he wasn't really a bad person, so you invite him to come and live with you?"

"Oh, don't be so melodramatic!  I had a room to rent, and he needed to rent a room.  It happens."

"No, it doesn't!  Not to normal people ...."

Harry smiled at his friend.  "Thanks, Ron."

"Damn it, Harry, you know I didn't mean it that way."  Ron gave him a frustrated look.  "Why do you have so little regard for your own safety?  Just because he was acquitted doesn't make him innocent, you know."

"He was questioned under Veritaserum.  That's about as good as the guarantees get."

"And it's still not enough."

Harry sighed.  "What do you want me to do?"

"Get rid of him!"

"You know, I've always had this feeling that you secretly want to run my life for me ...."

"No I _don't_ , Harry!"  Ron's voice was full of frustration and distress.  "I just want you to recognise that your life is at risk and let me _do_ something about it!"

"You can't wrap me in cotton-wool, Ron!  And you and Hermione have your own lives to lead, without fretting over me all the time – "  Harry caught himself just in time and quickly turned back to the stove.  He grabbed the steaming kettle and started to make the tea.  Over his shoulder he added, "Let me remind you that this was Hermione's idea, not mine.  I agreed to it to keep her happy."

"Yeah, and believe me, I'll be having words with her about that later – "

"Don't you dare!"  Harry was shocked at himself, not at the words but at the depth of anger and despair that he felt welling up inside him as he said them.  Some of the bitterness spilled over into his voice.  "For God's sake, Ron, let it go." 

There was a shocked pause.  He slapped the kettle back onto the hob and began swishing a long-handled spoon in the teapot to make it brew faster.  Rather than look at Ron, he watched his hand and there was something oddly familiar about the agitated movements of wrist, spoon and pot.  After a moment he identified it as a mannerism he must somehow have picked up from his Aunt Petunia, and he put the spoon down quickly.

"If," Harry said quietly, "you hadn't left and got married, if you were still living here and it was your safety at risk as much as mine, then you might – _might_ – have the right to order me around.  But you did leave and get married, and I'm happy for you, Ron, but even the fact that you're my best friend doesn't give you the right to walk back in here and start shouting at me.  This is my home and my life."

Ron had come a long way, he realised.  Only a few years ago the redhead would have taken a speech like that very badly and probably would have walked out in a temper.  Today, however, and rather unnervingly, Ron simply looked at him, and the pain and distress in his expression was far more than Harry wanted to deal with.  Any minute now he was going to say –

"Look, I'm sorry you ended up on your own here – "

"Oh, shut up!" Harry snapped.  This was one conversation he did not want to have with anyone, least of all Ron, and not here, not now, not _ever_.  He snatched a couple of mugs from the shelf, banging them down on the kitchen table, and plunged into the fridge looking for milk.  When he emerged again, he'd managed to get himself under control somewhat.  "I never wanted to keep any of you here indefinitely.  How bloody selfish would that be?"

Ron let out an impatient sigh.  "I wish you _would_ be a bit more selfish sometimes."

"Fine, so I'm being selfish now.  Hadn't you noticed?"  Harry slopped milk into the mugs.  "Let the Malfoy thing drop, okay?"

"I would if I couldn't think of a thousand ways this could go horribly wrong for you!"

"Drink your tea.  He'd have to be pretty stupid to try anything, really.  You think I don't know every Auror passing this way harasses my neighbours and tries to stick an extra ward or two around the house?"

"Yeah, and you take them all down again!"  Ron glowered at him over the top of his mug.

"They get in the way when I'm gardening," Harry replied blandly.  "I can live with the wards, but I wish you'd tell your people to leave the locals alone.  They're all Muggles and they don't understand people in pointy hats with wands."

"That's another thing," Ron said irritably.  "Why the hell did Sirius have to go and buy a house in the middle of a Muggle village, for heaven's sake?  We all stick out a mile when we visit you."

"Wizards stared at him," Harry said dryly.  "You know, the old "escapee from Azkaban" thing.  And I know how he felt.  I'd rather be surrounded by people who think I'm an eccentric recluse than all the finger-pointing witches in the world."

"You're getting bitter," Ron noted.  "I thought you were when they offered you the Order of Merlin and you started shouting at the Minister, but you stick a happy face on whenever some journalist trips you up in the street and ... well."

Harry saw his friend's expression and swallowed.  "I'm not bitter," he said rather weakly.  "Well, I try not to be.  It's just difficult to be nice about it when some idiot starts raving about me being a war hero.  They forget about people like George and Percy and your dad.  And Sirius." 

He'd had to shout at the Minister just to get all the names straight on the memorial plaque in Diagon Alley.  God, that was a bitter memory.  Seeing the look on Ron's face, he wished he hadn't mentioned it though.

 _Christ, we're both going to be snivelling into our tea in a minute._

"Look, the contracts are signed and it's done and dusted," he said quickly.  "I'm not about to ask Malfoy to leave, so what can I do to make you feel happier about the situation?"

It was an olive branch, and Ron was sensible enough to take it. 

"Let me at least put some stronger wards around the house, and an alarm spell that'll let us know if anyone a bit dodgy starts hanging around.  Having him here could make you a bigger target, you know.  He's not exactly popular."

Harry didn't like it much – Ron's definition of 'dodgy' was a lot broader than his, for one thing – but it was a small price to pay for peace between the two of them.

"Agreed."

 

*

 

Sounds of the argument drifted out of the kitchen and up the stairs, to the room where Draco Malfoy had put his things.

Right now he was standing in the middle of that room, wondering whether he should pack up again anyway.  Rather cravenly he hoped he wouldn't have to, or at least not until the morning.  It was late and it had begun to rain outside; he would have the devil's own job finding anywhere to stay at this hour, and having paid Harry Potter a full month's rent in advance, he wasn't sure if his budget would stretch that far anyway.

Christ, what a hell of a mess.  He should have put his foot down as soon as he saw who his prospective landlord was.  In fact, he couldn't imagine why he had allowed himself to be persuaded to take the room.  Even though it was quite a nice room.

He looked around at it again.

Alright, be generous – it was a _very_ nice room.  Definitely a good half a dozen steps up from the last place he'd lodged in.  Potter had said something about Dumbledore staying in it once or twice; Draco could imagine that quite easily.

In fact, the whole damn house was pretty nice and comfortable, airily laid out and with furnishings that were a pleasant blend of wizard and Muggle, which he supposed made a kind of sense considering their owner.  So it was weird that Harry Potter himself should look so ill at ease in his surroundings.  He stuck out like a sore thumb in this house; why, Draco couldn't imagine, but by God the man had changed.  And not just in ways that one would expect a messy war to change him.  Apparently being the twice-crowned hero of the wizarding world wasn't all roses.

Draco prided himself on his powers of observation.  He wouldn't have survived for long after his trial if he hadn't been on the ball.  By the time the wizard jury had grudgingly acquitted him, he was top of just about everyone's hate list, and most of those groups were willing and able to kill in cold blood.  In fact, he was rather surprised that Ron Weasley hadn't hexed him on sight today; it had certainly been a close thing.  Not that Draco entirely blamed him for two of his brothers had been murdered by Draco's father, after all.

Now Draco's powers of observation were telling him that all was not well in Potterland, and what was more, from the look of things Potter's friends knew something wasn't right too.  Everything from the manner of his arrival to that brief snatch of conversation on the stairs had been enough to convey Weasley's underlying anxiety to Draco.

Great, just great.  Maybe he should leave anyway.  He didn't want to be around if Harry Potter was finally succumbing to insanity.

On the other hand, if he left now he would probably end up in some flea-bitten Muggle bedsit again.  Of course, in a Muggle bedsit he was less likely to attract the attention of Death Eaters and vigilantes, but this _was_ Harry Potter's house – would that be of greater or lesser benefit to his safety?  Potter himself was still in the unenviable position of being top of the Death Eaters' list of favoured targets, but chances were that this house was locked down tight with all manner of protections, and it would be a brave assassin who tried to take Harry out these days anyway.  On the other hand, Ron Weasley now knew that Draco was here, which was not good – it meant that the Aurors knew exactly where he was living, something he had hoped to avoid.  And if the Aurors knew where he was, the vigilantes would shortly find out.  Would they try to get at him under Harry Potter's roof?  Difficult to say.  He couldn't imagine Harry taking kindly to attempted hits on someone living in his house, but some of the groups were more ... _motivated_ ... than others.  The more fanatical ones would probably convince themselves that they were 'saving' Harry from him.  Nor could Auror Weasley be relied upon to intervene if something like that happened. 

Draco sat down rather abruptly on an ottoman chest at the foot of the bed, and put his head in his hands.  Trying to sort out who was today's particular enemy was exhausting, but his life depended on staying ahead of those many and varied groups.  Twice he had been approached, supposedly by Death Eaters, with a view to his returning to the 'fold'.  On both occasions he'd turned the men who approached him over to the Aurors.  It simply wasn't  worth the risk, even had he been interested.  In the event, it had proved a wise decision both times, for the first group had been vigilantes hoping to catch him out.  But it made his head ache trying to decide who was what and why, whether he was safe today and if that would still be the case tomorrow.  Sometimes he wondered why he bothered.  If he just had the courage to step out with his guard down one day, at least it would all be over. 

But pride wouldn't let him do that.  Malfoy pride was pretty much all he had left, and he was damned if they were going to take that from him.

"Want a cup of tea?"

Draco's head shot up.  Harry was standing in the doorway, looking at him curiously.

"Do I have time for tea before I have to leave?" he asked curtly.

"Don't be stupid.  I told you; this is my house.  And we signed legally binding contracts, remember?"

"I'm not likely to sue you, Potter."  Draco stood up slowly, aware that Harry's eyes were tracking around the room.

There was a tiny frown on the dark-haired man's face.  "Is the rest of your stuff in storage?"

"No; this is it."  Draco felt a surge of bitterness that surprised him; he got a sharp grip on it and wrestled it into submission before he continued.  "Any other possessions have long since been consigned to the four winds."

"I wondered about that.  How come you're living in rented accommodation anyway?"

The question had a certain artless innocence to it that he supposed he should have expected from this man. 

"Not that it's any of your business," he said, sharply reminding Potter of his place, "but Malfoy Manor was confiscated by the Ministry after my father's execution.  Likewise most of the family fortune.  I'm surprised you don't already know that."

"I was a bit busy after your trial," Harry replied, unoffended.  "I lost track of a lot of people, not just you."

Draco wanted to say something cutting in response to this, but nothing came to mind.  And truth be told, his heart wasn't really in it. What was the point in baiting Potter?  After all, the man _had_ given him house-space.  He gave in.

"Yes, well ....  Fortunately, the Ministry wasn't able to lay claim to the money I inherited from my grandmother, so at least I have a small income.  Enough to live on, anyway.  Which is just as well, because I'm unemployable."

To his surprise, Harry didn't question that.  For a moment it looked like he might say something, but he appeared to change his mind at the last minute.  Instead, he said: "Do you want a cup of tea, then?"

Tea and off-hand kindness.  It was ridiculous, and Draco tried to ignore the tiny part of him that was pathetically grateful for it.

"All right."

Harry nodded.  "In the kitchen, when you're ready."

 

*

 

Harry had expected the situation to feel rather awkward, at least in the beginning, so it came as a surprise to him when it didn't.  Most of the time he wasn't really aware that Malfoy was even in the house, except for those occasions when he arrived home in the evenings to find the lights already on.  When they did encounter each other neither had much to say, although the atmosphere was quite cordial. 

Knowing that Ron and Hermione would give him grief if he didn't, Harry dutifully stopped by their house once or twice a week to let them see that he was still alive and well.  Other than that, life continued on its normal path.

Then one evening in mid November he had an unexpected visitor. 

When Ron had set up the new wards on the house, he'd added a catch-trap on the Floo outlet in the living room fireplace, to prevent people not keyed to Harry's fireplace Flooing into the house without warning.  Harry was in the middle of cooking his dinner when the alarm on the fireplace went off, alerting him to someone being caught in the trap.

It took a minute or two to verify who the visitor was and free him; it was Justin Finch-Fletchley. 

"Nice wards you have," the curly-headed former Hufflepuff observed with a wry grin, as he dusted himself down and stepped out of the grate.

"Ron's idea," Harry explained.  "Long time no see, Justin.  How are things?"

"Oh, you know … not bad."  Justin had been one of the many members of the Order of the Phoenix who had lived in the house during the last months of the war and just after.  "I thought I'd look you up, Harry, but I wasn't expecting to be eaten by your fireplace!"

Harry smiled at this, but he was wondering what on earth could have brought the other man here after all this time.  True, he'd got to know him a lot better during the war, but they'd never been close friends and once he'd left the house, Justin had never been back. 

"Cup of tea?" Harry asked, leading him through to the kitchen.

"Coffee would be good, if you've got it."

"Of course." 

Justin proceeded to make idle chit-chat for the next fifteen minutes, while Harry made the coffee and dug out a tin of biscuits from his cupboard, then he paused and gave Harry a friendly smile. 

"So what are you up to lately?"

Harry hated questions like that, especially when they came from people he wasn't close to.  He was always left wondering what they expected him to say when they asked.  So he shrugged.

"Oh … this and that.  I keep myself busy."

"I hear you've got a house guest."  Bright brown eyes watched him over the top of the coffee mug.

"Yeah."  Harry tried not to eye his cooling dinner wistfully; it was the one meal of the day that he bothered to make an effort with.  Then the comment actually registered.  "Where did you hear about that?"

"Oh, you know …."

"No, I don't."  Harry frowned at Justin.  "I thought only Ron and Hermione knew."

"I've got contacts at the Ministry," Justin said, with a shrug.  "Bit of a risk, don't you think?"

"Maybe.  No worse than walking down Diagon Alley on a dark night though.  I've been a target for so long that I reckon I've lost any novelty value," he joked.

"All the same," Justin persisted.  "Draco Malfoy?  Harry, do you have any idea how many people are watching him?  You don't want to get in the way if something happens."

Harry quietly put his own coffee mug down.  "Is that a warning?"

"Just a bit of friendly advice."

There was an tense pause.

"Don't take this the wrong way," Harry said at last, "but I'd really prefer it if people didn't try to get too involved in my business.  I'm a grown man, you know – fearsome bane of the Dark Lord and all that.  I can look after myself."

"I think you're missing the point," Justin said dryly.

Harry gave up trying to be diplomatic.  "No, I'm not.  I think I got the point just fine.  And now I'd like you to leave, please."

Justin put his mug on the kitchen table.  His expression, when he looked up, was genuinely regretful.  "No offence, Harry, but sometimes I think you need rescuing from yourself."

"Yeah, well if Ron and Hermione haven't managed it yet, what makes you think you can?"  Harry tried to make the comment sound good-humoured, but he could tell that the other man didn't take it kindly.

Too bad.  People couldn't just walk into his house and issue threats, damn it.

Harry saw Justin out through the fireplace and closed the Floo behind him.  Then he went back to the kitchen to throw his dinner away.  His appetite was gone.

 

*

 

"Justin Finch-Fletchley?  That's a new one." 

"He as good as told me that he wouldn't be held responsible if I got caught in the crossfire!" Harry said indignantly. 

"Well, I warned you that Malfoy wasn't popular."  Ron was being annoyingly calm about this.

"Yeah, but what the hell is the world coming to if people think they can walk into my house and say things like that to me?  Damn it, I didn't spend all those years fighting Voldemort and his cronies, just to find myself facing a bunch of self-righteous prats who think they can dictate how I live my life!"

Ron rubbed his nose thoughtfully.  "So what do you want me to do about it?"

Harry looked at him.  His friend was regarding him with that slightly vague look of concern again. 

"Nothing," he said quietly, and got up to go.

"Harry ...."  Ron grabbed his sleeve.  "Harry, sit down."

"Why bother?" Harry snapped.  "It's about Malfoy, so you don't want to know!"

"That's not true.  Damn it, _sit down!_ "

Harry sat down, inwardly seething.  Ron sighed a little and leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees. 

"Look," he said, and suddenly the vagueness was gone, leaving behind the face of a very serious Auror.  "The vigilantes were after Malfoy from the moment he stepped out of the court after his trial.  He spent nearly two years in Ministry safe houses because of it."

"How do you know that?" demanded Harry.

"I've been looking into his records since he turned up again.  Now, most of the groups that were interested in him stopped operating a couple of years after the war ended, but there's at least one still around and since most of the more notorious Death Eater escapees have been caught, they focus on people like Malfoy – the ones they reckon are turncoats out to save their own skins.  There was that nasty case six months ago when they grabbed one of the Midgen family, for example."

"That was vigilantes?"  Harry was surprised.  He'd assumed Christopher Midgen had been the victim of a mugging gone wrong.

"'Fraid so."  Ron grimaced.  "It took a lot of work keeping _that_ story out of the _Prophet_ , I can tell you.  The thing is, Harry, Malfoy's name is mud in so many places.  The Death Eaters hate him for betraying his father.  The vigilantes hate him for being Draco Malfoy.  A group of Dark Disciples tried to hook up with him eighteen months ago and he turned them in to us; that made him unpopular with them.  And a bunch of vigilantes pretending to be Death Eaters to catch him out also got turned over to us, so perversely they hate him even more."  He breathed a laugh.  "It makes even _me_ feel sorry for him, and that's saying something.  Talk about your sins catching up with you."

"That's all very well, but he's living in my house," Harry reminded him.  "While it's very nice to know that I'm not quite the hot target I thought I was, I don't like the idea of people trying to murder him, and especially not in my home."

"I know, but I'm not sure what more I can do.  I've strengthened the wards a bit – "

"Make them any stronger and my teeth'll start vibrating!"

" – And I've locked up the Floo.  You've got an alarm spell on the house."  Ron shrugged.  "I'll put the word around that there might be trouble at your place, but I don't want to say too much in case the wrong people hear about it.  So the only other thing I can suggest is warning Malfoy that he's liable to be hit if he's not careful.  And I imagine he already knows that."

"And what about Justin?"

Ron considered that.  "I could pay him a visit, but it's a bit redundant.  He must have realised you'd tell me about him.  Besides, I doubt very much that it'll be him who comes after Malfoy – chances are, he was just a convenient mouthpiece because he happens to know you reasonably well."

"Okay," Harry sighed.  "Thanks, Ron.  I'd better be off and let you get on with your work." 

He stood up, but once again Ron grabbed his sleeve to detain him.

"Harry ... _please_ be careful, eh?"

Harry gave him a rather wan smile.  "It gives my life texture, doesn't it?"

 


	2. Chapter 2

Perhaps because life had suddenly become more exciting than usual, Harry found himself dreaming again.  Nightmares in one form or another were something he had lived with for most of his life, but after he was left in the house on his own he had exchanged bad dreams for insomnia.  Now, with Malfoy under his roof, he was sleeping again but it couldn't be said that the change was as good as a rest.  The old, nightly parade of the dead in front of his eyeballs started again, waking him in the early hours, shaking and dripping with sweat.

After one particularly horrendous dream one night, he dragged himself out of bed, found his dressing gown and spectacles, and padded downstairs to get a drink.  To his surprise there was a light under the kitchen door, and when he walked in he found Malfoy half-dozing over an empty mug at the kitchen table.  He started violently when Harry walked in and stared at him for a moment with wide, almost panic-stricken eyes.

"Sorry," Harry said, still a little sleep-fuddled.  "What are you doing up?"

"Couldn't sleep."  Malfoy swallowed slightly and looked away.  "Did I wake you?"

"Nah.  I couldn't sleep either."  Harry wandered into the pantry, wincing a little at the cold stone floor on his bare feet, and peered at the shelves for a moment.  He found the round tub of cocoa powder and brought it out.  "Want some cocoa?"

"Um ... okay.  Thanks."

Harry nodded and moved slowly around the kitchen, finding milk and a small saucepan to heat it in.  Then he slumped down in a seat at the table while the stove did its work.  It felt like his brain was still in dreamtime, and after a moment he took his spectacles off, trying to rub the foul images out of his eyes with cold fingertips.  He didn't know which nightmares he hated more; the ones about Voldemort, or the ones about the things Voldemort had done.

"You look like I feel."

Harry looked up, mildly surprised.  Without his glasses, Malfoy was a blur; he put them back on and the other man jumped into focus.  There was no smile on the blond man's face; his statement had been grimly factual.

"Crap, you mean?"  Ouch; that was a bit tactless.  But Malfoy didn't take offence.  He was studying Harry thoughtfully.

"You know, I never imagined you like this."

Harry grinned weakly.  "What – sleep-deprived in a dressing gown?"

"No ... living on your own in a huge house the middle of nowhere.  I always saw you living in a nice little cottage with a nice little wife and a couple of nice little kids.  Not like this."  Malfoy regarded him morosely.  "What happened, Potter?"

Harry's smile slipped.  "Guess I wasn't the marrying kind," he managed after a moment.  He got up and went to take the milk off the hob.  There was a pause as he made the cocoa, then he sat down again, handing Malfoy his mug.  "What about you?" he asked, more to divert the conversation away from him than from a genuine desire to know.  "Didn't you want to get married?"

"It's not exactly an option when you spend most of your time wondering if you'll find somewhere relatively safe to sleep at night."  Malfoy sipped his cocoa reflectively.  "Actually, I thought _I_ might be the one to end up on my own in a big house in the middle of nowhere.  I forgot the Ministry could legally seize my father's assets."  He shrugged and turned back to Harry.  "So what's the story, Potter?  I always thought you'd end up with Weasley's sister – did she go off with someone else?"

Damn.  This was embarrassing.  "No, Ginny's still single."

"So what's the problem?"

"She's not my type."  Harry hoped that would shut him up.

Malfoy raised one pale brow at him.  "You surprise me.  And no one else lined up?"

Harry looked at him, wondering what he could say that would silence Malfoy without having to be downright rude.  This wasn't a topic of conversation he ever enjoyed; he didn't like to dwell on the fact that he'd been left painfully on his own in more ways than one.

"There was someone," he said after a moment's deliberation.

"And?"

"And he married someone else," Harry replied, with a tight little smile.  The startled look on Malfoy's face was worth it.

"Oh ...."

"Yes, oh!"  Harry drank his rapidly cooling cocoa in a series of quick gulps. 

He wondered if Malfoy would twig who he was talking about.  Probably; the man wasn't stupid after all, and it didn't take a genius to work it out. 

From the look on his face, he clearly had.  "Does he know?"

Good question.  Harry closed his eyes for a moment.  "I don't know," he said quietly, "so I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell him, just in case."

"I'm not likely to get the opportunity."  Malfoy finished his own cocoa.  "Well, that certainly wasn't what I was expecting.  I think I'll head back to bed now."  He got up and put his mug in the sink.  "Thanks for the cocoa."

"Malfoy …."  Harry rubbed at his forehead tiredly.  "Ron told me to warn you that you might become a target for a vigilante group.  I had a visitor the other day - "

"That's nothing unusual."  The old, shuttered expression was back.  "Do you want me to find somewhere else?"

"No, of course not!  But you ought to be on your guard."

"I've been on my guard for years.  It's you who should be worrying."  The look the blond man gave him was edged with annoyance.  "Good night."  And he was gone.

Harry sat there for a minute or two, staring at the empty doorway, then shook his head and got up.  He put his own mug into the sink and switched the lights off, heading back up the stairs to bed.

He was just climbing under the covers again, when he caught sight of a small bottle on his bedside table.

"Shit!"  He'd forgotten to take his pills again.  No wonder the damn things didn't seem to be working.  With a sigh, he sat up and opened the bottle, tipping two small, innocuous-looking white tablets into his palm.  The doctor had told him they took at least a week to take effect, and often nearer two.  Harry had been taking the medication for two _months_ now and in many ways he felt a whole lot worse, especially since one of the side effects was an upset stomach now and then.  He was determined to persevere, though.

With another sigh, he swallowed them down with half a glassful of water and crawled back under the covers.  He needed his sleep; he had things to do the next day.

 

*

 

One of the things that puzzled Draco was what exactly Harry did with his time.  

He was unemployed himself, and well knew that time tended to weigh heavily on your hands, so he had taken to lurking around libraries and museums - Muggle ones generally, since he was rather conspicuous in the wizard ones.  It was pretty boring.

Harry, however, always seemed to have something to do, somewhere that he was going, and yet Draco had yet to discover that he had a job. 

So Harry-watching became his new hobby, and part of him hated himself for it even though he knew he'd been doing it on and off since the day they first met.  Mostly he rationalised it as being good security, although in his more honest moments with himself Draco admitted that it was simple curiosity.  He wanted to know what it was about Harry that had changed.  And he wanted to know what thing he saw in Harry's face sometimes that he recognised in himself.

It drove him crazy that Harry disappeared most mornings to an unknown destination.  It wasn't every day of the week, but there was a definite pattern to it - one week it would be Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, while the following week it would be Thursday, Friday and Saturday.  Occasionally Sunday was thrown in too.

Finally, Draco lost his battle with himself and decided to follow the other man, an urge which he knew to be utterly irrational and a dangerous risk to himself besides.  But he _had_ to satisfy his curiosity.

It wasn't easy.  He lost Harry almost at once the first day, when the dark-haired man stepped into the back garden and Apparated somewhere.  The next day, however, he was just in time to catch Harry using the Floo to go to the Potion Pot - one of the smaller cafés in Diagon Alley - and managed to follow him.  He lost him again on arrival, but it was a starting point, and the next day Draco was up and out of the house before Harry had finished his breakfast.  He was in the Potion Pot when the other man arrived and from then on following him was easy.

Now Draco had a new excuse for following his landlord; he was appalled at how little care the Boy Who Lived took with his own safety.  Draco himself had taken the precaution of a concealing cloak and a Misdirection Spell, but Harry walked around as though he was a mere nobody - or maybe he simply didn't think anyone would want to kill him anymore.  Which was criminally stupid.

From the Potion Pot, Harry went to the Leaky Cauldron.  The building was a mere shell these days, having been burned out during the war, but the doorway through to Muggle London still existed, and it was in this magically stabilised ruin that one of the lesser memorials to the war dead was located.  Seeing his quarry's destination, Draco half-expected him to be aiming for the memorial, but Harry barely spared it a glance, passing through the bare, fire-blackened walls and out of the doorway into London.

Draco followed.  Now Harry was walking briskly down the Muggle street to the nearest Tube Station; at which point his follower began to rummage in his pockets, wondering if he had enough Muggle change on him for a ticket.

They travelled halfway across London, Draco nearly losing Harry again twice in the morning traffic.  When they finally arrived at their destination, it was in a run down part of the East End where most of the houses and shops seemed to be boarded up or sporting heavy grills across the windows.  People, mostly youths, were hanging around aimlessly, and this did not look to Draco to be the kind of place where you lingered without a purpose.

But in the middle of this was a building that was totally different.  It was painted with garishly bright colours, and bore a jaunty sign over the door that said, in chunky graffiti-art lettering, "NEVERLAND".

To Draco's astonishment, _this_ was Harry's destination.

 

*

 

"What happened to the wall?" Harry asked, as he stripped his coat off.  The bright paint of the mural in the games room was streaked and blistering.  It had been fine when he left on Saturday - okay, a little chipped and damaged in places, but still quite reasonable.  Now it would probably have to be totally repainted.

Karen grimaced.  "The roof leaked over the weekend and the water got in.  You should see Sally's office upstairs!  Her computer's a wreck."

"Damn.  Did she have all her files backed up?"

"Luckily!  But we're still trying to salvage the paper records."

"Try a hair-dryer!" Harry advised.  "Okay, what's being done about the roof?"

"Tim brought a ladder from home, but he had an appointment elsewhere."  Karen ran a hand over her elaborately braided hair and gave Harry an anxious look.  "Harry, you know what I'm like with heights - if it was just going up into the attic space …."

"Not a problem," he assured her.  "Where's the ladder?"

Ten minutes later, he was up on the roof investigating the damage.  Though not as bad as he had first thought, it was still a bigger matter than simply pushing a couple of loose slates back into place.  Two or three had been damaged somehow and whole chunks were missing.  It looked like someone had lobbed a brick at the roof  sometime, which in this area wasn't so unlikely.

Harry hesitated as he looked at the damage.  Doing this the Muggle way would cost money, money that the shelter could ill afford, and he didn't think he could get away with the old "my cousin the builder" story again to explain where he had found new slates.  Besides, he would need that excuse for buying the paint for the games room mural. 

He glanced around.  No one was about other than Karen, who was holding the bottom of the ladder for him.

"Is it bad?" she called, seeing him look.

"Nothing I can't push back together," he called back, and took another step up the ladder, leaning over the eaves so that she couldn't quite see what he was doing.

Then he whipped his wand out of his sleeve and pointed it at the damage.  " _Reparo_ tiles!" he whispered, and the broken pieces magically fused together again.

"All done!" he called, and slipped the wand back into his sleeve, murmuring the charm that kept it hidden while he was working.

"That's a relief!" Karen smiled, when he reached the ground again.  "Harry, I don't know what we'd do without you."

He shrugged, trying to cover his discomfort at the praise.  It wasn't like he'd done anything extraordinary, after all - not by wizard standards.  "Just a couple of loose tiles," he muttered.  "Let's have another look at that wall.  I might know where I can lay my hands on some cheap paint, and the kids could help redecorate it …."

They were just surveying the damage in the games room when a trio of the regulars - older kids who used the shelter almost daily - came in.  Harry recognised them at once; slim, quiet Tharik with his fierce eyes; stocky Amos with the shaved head and tattoos standing out even against his dark skin; and Jerome, another tall, slender boy with a chip on his shoulder against the whole world.  By the standards of the local education authority they were the worst of drop-outs, and the police quite readily called them mindless thugs, but the fact that they caused no trouble here at the shelter - or allowed anyone to give Karen and Sally any trouble - told its own story.  Harry himself didn't think they were bad kids; they just happened to have more problems than most.  They'd given Harry quite a bit of grief when he first started helping out, for they were convinced that the white guy (he was one of the few white people seen in the shelter) had ulterior motives for being there.

Which perhaps he did, in the strictest sense, but they weren't any of the kind the kids were thinking of, and an unexpected bout with Amos in this very games room the week he'd arrived, had taught them quite a bit of respect for Harry.  His training during the war against Voldemort had given him more than enough preparation for dealing with an opponent like Amos.  The boys hadn't expected the slight, gently-spoken man to be quite so tough.

These days he was an accepted part of the team, and someone the boys could talk to when they didn't feel like unburdening themselves to one of the women.  It was often disturbing, if not downright harrowing, but Harry had his own disturbing stories to tell and had reason to know that children could live with burdens far worse then they should ever be expected to.  Mostly a sympathetic ear was all they wanted, and more than they could expect at home.

He was greeted now with the boisterous enthusiasm of streetwise teenagers, but the usual extended ritual of jokes and friendly needling was cut short for once.

"Say, man, there's some white guy hanging out on the street out there," was Jerome's opening comment.  "You know him?"

Harry was surprised.  "I don't think so - should I?"

"He followed you here," Tharik put in.  "He's been looking at this place since you arrived, but trying to look like he's supposed to be there, you know?  Just hanging on the other side of the road."

"How old is he?" Karen asked.  "He could just be a newcomer - "

She was cut short by a couple of sniggers. 

"He's _way_ too old," Amos told her, grinning.  "And man, is he too white!  Pale, pale little guy.  Nobody _we_ ever saw in this neighbourhood."

An odd prickle went up the back of Harry's neck.  "Where is he now?"

"Like I said," Tharik told him, "just hanging on the other side of the road, looking like he thinks he blends."

"Should I call the police?" Karen asked worriedly.  "We've never had problems here before, but - "

"No, let me deal with it," Harry told her calmly.  "If he followed me here, it's probably me he wants.  He might be someone I know, but why ….  Well, never mind that.  I'll take a look."

"You want help, man?" Jerome asked him, a dangerous little sparkle in his eyes.

Harry grinned at him.  "Tell you what - if I look like I'm in trouble, you can come and bail me out."

Their chuckles followed him to the door.

It took one quick, cautious glance out of the front door to see who the boys were referring to.  Harry had guessed as much from the moment they described him as "pale", but just to be on the safe side, he doubled back and left the building via the side entrance.  He came up behind the loiterer very quickly and quietly - there was an odd feeling of pride in still being able to sneak like that - and he had his wand out of his sleeve and pressed unobtrusively to the other man's side before he was even aware of Harry's presence.

Draco jumped violently, and froze at the feel of the wand tip against his ribs.

"You know, some of my friends might take your presence here the wrong way," Harry said quietly.  He was decidedly unamused.  This was the last thing he had expected after all these weeks.

"It's not what it looks like," Draco replied, after a moment.

"No?  Because from where I'm standing it looks like you're stalking me.  Where's your wand, Draco?"

"Jeans pocket," the blond man ground out.  "Front left.  Why, are you going to confiscate it?"

"I should!" Harry snapped back.  "Ron would do a whole lot more than that!  What the hell do you think you're playing at?"

"I …."  Draco fell silent, and if Harry hadn't known him better, he would have been sure the other man was embarrassed.

"Well?"

"I … was curious.  That's all.  I wondered where you went every day."

Harry stared at him.  "Why?"

Draco shrugged.  "I don't have much else to do.  Like I told you, I'm unemployable.  I have nothing to do and I get bored."

"Jesus!"  After a moment's hesitation, Harry put his wand away.  "You'd better come inside.  It's not safe for you on the street here."

"Don't be ridiculous – "

"This is Muggle territory, you idiot!  The kids who told me you were here were ready to take pot-shots at you for hanging around.  This isn't like _our_ world – you stick out like a sore thumb, and in this part of London people really notice that kind of thing."  Harry glared at him.  "Now get inside!"

The trio of boys had expanded to a gang of ten, including several girls, when Harry pushed Draco roughly through the front door.  Karen was waiting with them; she looked at Draco then looked at Harry, and her brows went up.

"Friend of yours?" she asked blandly.

"Someone I went to school with," he replied shortly.  "Karen, can I borrow Sally's office for a few minutes?  I need to talk to this prat."

"Help yourself," she replied, and stepped to one side so that they could get to the stairs.

"You sure you don't want any help?" Amos invited again, giving Draco a nasty look.

"No, we'll be fine," Harry assured him, and gave Draco a shove towards the stairs.  "Go on – first door on the left."

It wasn't until they were inside the office and Harry had put a quick silencing charm on the door that Draco spoke again.

"I'm glad to see you at least carry your wand with you."

Harry turned and folded his arms across his chest, eyeing the other man measuringly.  "What's that supposed to mean?"

"I followed you here with almost no effort at all," Draco said, annoyed.  "You made no attempt to conceal your movements whatsoever – a blind man could have followed you with a simple tracing spell!"

Harry shrugged.  "So?"

"What do you mean, _So?_ "  Now Draco was aghast.  "Potter, do you have a death wish?  Have you any idea how many people still want you dead?  They could track you to this place and take you out, and it might be weeks before your charming friends knew what had happened to you!"

"They're welcome to try."  Harry fixed him with a curious stare.  "Tell me, is that your excuse for following me?  You want me to believe you have some touching concern for my welfare after all these years?"

"No!" the other man snapped irritably.  "What you do with your own life is your business, but – "

"So why _did_ you follow me today?"

There was a sullen pause.  "Like I said, I was bored and I wondered what you did with yourself all day.  I thought maybe you had a job."

"Well, as it happens, Malfoy, I _don't_ have a job in the strictest sense.  I volunteer here.  Satisfied?"

The blond wizard fumed silently. 

"As it happens," Harry said more quietly, after a moment, "like you, I'm pretty much unemployable.  And, like you, I get bored very easily.  I chose to do volunteer work here, rather than going out of my mind at home all day."

"You're unemployable," Draco said disbelievingly.

"That's right."

"Harry Potter can't get a job."

"Correct."

"That has to be the biggest pile of bullshit I ever heard."

"Alright, maybe it's a slight exaggeration," Harry said rather acidly, "but given my personal history, you'll have to excuse me if I prefer _not_ to work for the Ministry in some desk job manufactured for me because of who I am.  Likewise you can call me quaint if you like, but I prefer _not_ to be employed by _Witch Weekly_ or the _Daily Prophet_ as a celebrity columnist.  I'm funny that way."

"So get a job stacking shelves for Flourish and Blotts!"

"I tried that.  They were very nice about my application, but they felt I might be a bit of an embarrassment working on their shop floor.  The celebrity status, you know.  They thought people might be coming to see me rather than the books.  It was the same with a couple of other places I tried."  Which had been pretty humiliating.  Everyone in the wizarding world loved him – so much that they didn't want him anywhere near them.

Draco was still staring at him in patent disbelief.  "Okay ... so why didn't you take up professional Quidditch?  You were certainly good enough."

"I was injured during the war," Harry replied patiently.  His raised his right arm cautiously, waiting for the sharp pull of scar tissue over damaged muscles and tendons.  "I lost some movement in this arm.  It's good enough for everyday stuff, but not for catching the Snitch.  Or working as an Auror - not that I wanted to do that anyway."  He tried to make a joke of it.  "I'll show you the scar sometime.  It's almost a match for this one – "  He tapped the zigzag mark above his right brow.

Draco was still staring at him with puzzled exasperation.  "Fine – so you can't get a normal job.  That doesn't explain why you're _here_."

Harry shrugged.  "They needed help, and I had the time to give it – "

"No, Potter, that isn't it.  This is a _Muggle_ charity.  If you were so desperate to do good works, why not get involved with St. Mungo's?"

"Maybe because I didn't want to increase my so-called fame."  Harry started to grow annoyed.  "I'm not some wealthy patriarch from one of the grand old wizarding families, out to dispense largesse to make myself look good!  Besides, I liked the sound of this place.  They do important work here."

"Oh, let me guess!"  The old Malfoy sneer was back.  "The name is taken from _Peter Pan_ , isn't it?  Is this where you tell me you have an affinity with all the other 'lost boys' they take in?"

"You can piss off again, you know!  No one asked you to follow me here, after all."

"Do Weasley and Granger know you come here? 

Now it was Harry's turn to fume.  "Hermione knows."

"But Weasley doesn't?  I'll bet he'd throw about a dozen different kinds of fit if he knew you came to an unprotected place like this!"

"And you're going to tell him?"

They glared at each other for a minute or two.  Draco was the first to look away, heaving a disgusted sigh and sticking his hands into his pockets.

"You really are a pig, Malfoy," Harry told him irritably.  "What does it matter to you where I choose to spend my time, or how big a risk it is to me?"

"I happen to like the small amount of security I have at the moment," Draco told him stiffly.  "If you go and get yourself killed, I'll be out on the streets again."

Harry stared at him in disbelief.  "You want to make sure I don't get myself killed so that you can keep your room?"  He almost laughed.  That was the weirdest compliment he had ever received – and he was quite certain that Draco would protest it being a compliment even at wand-point.  "Fine!  If you're determined to act like some kind of bodyguard, you can damn well give me a hand here."

"Hey, wait a minute!  I didn't say – "

"Too late."  For the first time in weeks Harry felt a surge of genuine amusement at the other man's panic-stricken face.  "You've been press-ganged!  You can help me repaint the games room, soldier."

 

*

 

The week that followed was a source of both amusement and intrigue to Harry.  Draco kicked up a tremendous fuss about being expected to help redecorate a Muggle children's shelter, and never stopped complaining (in his unique and well-remembered Malfoy way) from start to finish. 

But he didn't walk away, as he could quite easily have done anytime he wanted.

Harry wisely opted not to point this out to him, instead simply handing Draco brushes and paint and letting him get on with it.  He submitted meekly to his design skills being criticised and his brushwork condemned, while at the same time fending off good-naturedly the smart comments of the kids, all of whom had gone from overt suspicion of the blond stranger to reluctant appreciation of his acid wit.

No one could have predicted it, but something in Draco's combination of embittered sarcasm and beautiful public schoolboy accent appealed to the disaffected teenagers, especially when Harry was the butt of his comments.  Probably like all predators they recognised a long-standing feud when they saw one.  Whatever it was, the two of them provided ample entertainment that week, and by the following Friday Harry finished up his shift in an unaccustomed good mood and headed home.

He was late arriving home, having stopped off to do some shopping, and his arms were full of groceries when he Apparated awkwardly into his front garden.  At once he was blinded by unexpected lights and stunned to find his garden full of Aurors.

"What on earth is going on?" he demanded of the first person he encountered, and when the question wasn't answered he repeated it again, this time much more loudly and angrily.

Ron appeared out of the crowd, his face grim.  "You had visitors while you were out," he told Harry.  "The alarm spell went off about an hour ago.  Luckily your housemate was out as well, but they've been through the house.  Fawkes and Hedwig were kicking up a hell of a racket when I got here."

For a moment Harry was too shocked to speak; then he found his voice.  "Who were they?"

"Come and have a look."

"You _caught_ them?"

"No, but they left their calling card behind."

Ron led him up to the front door where a couple of Aurors Harry vaguely knew were standing guard.  They stepped back and the patch of white rendered wall next to the door was revealed.

Someone had sprayed a crude Dark Mark on the wall in luminous green paint, and crossed it through with red.  In more red paint they had daubed the words "NONE SHALL REST WHO FOLLOWED HIS WILL" above it.  Underneath were the initials "AOP".

"Avengers of the Phoenix," Ron said over Harry's shoulder.  "If it _is_ them I'll have to reactivate their file, because the Avengers supposedly disbanded two years ago.  But I doubt it.  It's more likely a bunch of kids fired up by Daddy's stories of hunting Death Eaters - "

"That's supposed to make me feel better?"  Harry was furious.  He pushed through the milling Aurors and walked into his home. 

It was little consolation that the damage was mostly overturned furniture and uprooted pot-plants.  The invaders had saved their spray-paint for the outside apparently.  This did not make Harry any happier.  He stormed into the kitchen, discovered that the pine table had been overturned and righted it with an angry flick of his wand before dumping his groceries on it.  Every cupboard door in the kitchen was open and the contents thoroughly rifled.  The pantry door was also standing open and Harry could see without taking an inventory that a lot of the contents had been taken.  Whoever it was had not been above a little opportunistic theft while they were at it.

"You know, where I come from, breaking in and stealing is a criminal offence called burglary." Harry told Ron curtly as he stalked back down the passage and headed for the stairs.

Hermione was at the top of the stairs, her face etched with distress.  "Oh Harry - "

"What have they done up here?" he asked her.

"They pinched what little stuff I had, and took some of yours for good measure," Draco's voice said, very controlled, and he appeared in the doorway of his room.  "They tried their hands at graffiti as well, but their artwork isn't up to my standard, frankly."

He was a lot calmer than Harry, who surveyed the AOP emblem dug into the paintwork of the door with growing anger.  There was another, in spray-paint, on the sprigged wallpaper above the bed.  This room was more abused - the bedside table and chair had been ruthlessly smashed up, the bedding ripped apart, Draco's clothes had been pulled out of the wardrobe and torn up, and his modest toiletries had been smeared into the carpet.

Harry stared at the wreckage silently for several minutes, until some muffled squawking came to his ears.  He turned on his heel and headed quickly down the passage to his own room but before he got there, Hedwig came sailing out of the open door to land on his shoulder.  She was angrier than he had seen her in a long time, hooting repeatedly, clicking her beak and flapping her wings in agitation.  When Harry looked inside his bedroom door, Fawkes was perched on the foot-board of his bed, glaring balefully with all his feathers fluffed up.  He was starting to look a little bedraggled on the run up to his latest Burning Day anyway and the overall effect was of an old feather-duster that had been tossed ruthlessly inside a pillowcase. 

Harry extended one hand and Fawkes instantly took flight to his shoulder.  For a moment he stood in the doorway, surveying the emptied drawers and cupboards and general disarray of his personal belongings, trying to get a grip on his temper. 

"Are you two alright?" he asked the birds, not caring if anyone thought talking to them was strange.  In response Hedwig very gently nipped his ear and Fawkes shook his feathers back into place decisively.  Apparently they were both unharmed, if very annoyed at the evening's events.

Bolstered by their attention, Harry was able to step inside his room and take stock of the damage.  It was less than he had feared - there were no painted slogans and no damaged furniture – but a number of things were missing, including his broomstick which had been propped in the corner, and there wasn't a single photograph that hadn't been torn from its frame and the glass smashed.  That hurt him badly, for most of the people in those photographs were now dead.  Gently tipping Fawkes and Hedwig off, he bent to pick up a picture of his parents, letting the broken glass slide to the floor.

"Your broom can probably be traced," Hermione said softly, from the doorway.

"They'll be lucky if they don't break their necks trying to fly it," Harry replied.  He was surprised at how controlled his voice sounded to his own ears.  He didn't feel controlled inside.  "That's the broom I flew in the last engagement of the war.  It got really temperamental afterwards."  He looked around and saw her face.  "What's the matter?"

She was wearing the pinched expression of someone who had to deliver yet more bad news.  "Harry ... we think they've been in the attic as well.  The trapdoor was open when we got here – "

Harry was past her in a flash and running down the passage. 

The trapdoor into the attic was still wide open, although someone had put the ladder back.  Harry flipped it down again, and climbed quickly up into the cool, dark roof space.  He snapped a curt command at the magic lamp hanging from the rafters and the attic was flooded with light.

The invaders had been very thorough in their destruction.  Every last box, trunk and bundle stored there had been pulled open and items strewn around.  All of Sirius's clothes, his books and private papers, and many other items that Harry had packed away with loving care after his death were spread across the dusty boards under the roof.  Remus Lupin's things had been treated with equal roughness.  Worse, when Harry began to pick over the muddled heaps he realised that items were missing from here too.  Among other things, at least two of Lupin's hand-written spellbooks had been stolen, along with an antique pocket-watch that he had always worn, Sirius's spare wand, _all_ of his private journals, and a magic carpet one the men had illicitly owned.

It was impossible to describe how Harry felt at that moment.  Bad enough that people should have ransacked his home, but to have gone through these boxes which contained all that was left of two dead war heroes – it was a sacrilege that brought tears to his eyes as other indignities he had suffered over the years could not.

When he emerged from the attic again, grief had turned to boiling rage. 

"Please do not tell me that these people were vigilantes after Draco," he said with quiet venom to Ron.  "None of the vigilante groups in operation after the war would have done this.  They wouldn't have dirtied their hands by robbing their targets."

To his credit, Ron remained unmoved by Harry's tone, although some of his fellow Aurors began to look very nervous.

"This probably wasn't a vigilante group as such," he replied.  "It certainly wasn't the AOP – their hits were always clean, with the sole aim of grabbing the Death Eater and stringing them up.  Like I said, this is more likely to be a bunch of kids who've been listening to loose talk in their families."

Harry stared at him.  "Some kids, if they could break those wards!"

Ron shrugged.  "I didn't say they were _all_ kids – I'm guessing some of them are a bit older, if not wiser."

"Oh, that makes it alright, then!"

"No, it doesn't!" Ron said sharply.  "Of _course_ it doesn't!  But I warned you from the word go that something like this could happen, didn't I?  I asked you - _begged_ you - to let me secure the house properly, but you wouldn't.  The fact is, there are a lot of people out there who resented Lucius Malfoy's son escaping with a slapped wrist.  Maybe _they_ wouldn't go so far as to break into your house to get at him, but plenty of them have kids who've been brought up hearing about the Death Eaters who got away.  Kids who, I might add, have been raised with an entirely different idea of acceptable behaviour to you and me.  We're living in a different era now, Harry; you'd have a hard time explaining to some of these kids the difference between lynching a man because he killed your brother, and burgling the house he's living in because you heard your uncle saying he's no-good scum."

"Great.  Just great."  Harry was distantly aware that his breathing was becoming jerky and irregular, in the ominous way it sometimes did when he was on the verge of one of his more dangerous outbursts.  "Nice to know that as yet another benefit of being a hero, I can count on the complete contempt of the next generation."

"Public opinion is a great leveller, isn't it, Potter?" Draco commented dryly from his bedroom doorway.

Harry shot him a grim look but made no comment.  Realising that his hands were shaking, he stuffed them into his jeans pockets and turned back to Ron.  "I don't care about my own stuff," he said, and despite his best efforts his voice shook slightly.  "But they took a stack of Sirius's things, including his journals.  I want them back, Ron.  I don't care about the rest, I just want Sirius and Remus's things back.  _Nobody_ has the right to touch those things but me."

"I'll see what we can do," Ron replied gently, but Harry could see the doubt in his eyes and it made him so angry, he could have screamed.

It wasn't Ron's fault and he knew it.  It was his own fault for keeping things of value to him in the house and then stubbornly refusing to protect it properly.  But what really chewed at Harry was that these things had been stolen by members of his own community, the wizarding community – they were things that had value only to him and, to some extent, other wizards.  A common Muggle burglar would probably never have touched them.  Only a handful of people even knew that the boxes had been up in the attics.

Then it dawned on him, and the realisation was so sudden that it nearly took his breath away.  If only a handful of people knew about the stash of things belonging to Sirius and Remus, why had these so-called vigilante kids even bothered looking in the attics?

Harry opened up the rip in the wards and Apparated out of the house before Ron and the others fully realised what was happening.

 

*

 

While the main offices of the _Daily Prophet_ were still in Diagon Alley, the _Evening Prophet_ was produced in Hogsmeade; a decision taken after the offices of the _Hogsmeade Herald_ were reduced to rubble during the war, putting the northern publication out of business.  Ordinarily, travelling there took a couple of hours, using either the Floo network or public portkeys.  Harry, however, still had contacts at the Ministry of Magic and, using the Ministry magic mirrors, was there within a matter of fifteen minutes.

It was getting late by the time he stalked through the doors of the _Evening Prophet_ , but the newspaper never slept and many of the staff were still on the premises.  The young witch manning the reception desk was so over-awed at seeing _the_ Harry Potter that she let him through to the staff areas without a murmur and Harry, familiar with the layout of the building from past visits, had no problem finding the editorial offices.

Justin Finch-Fletchley was sitting at his desk in the main office, chatting with colleagues, when Harry walked up to him.  He looked up, surprised at the appearance of his former schoolmate.

"Harry!  What brings you - _unh -_ "

Harry seized him by the front of his robes and dragged him bodily out of his chair, ignoring the astonished gasps of the other journalists.  One look at his face, which was white and tight-lipped with fury, silenced them.

 _"Harry!"_   Justin tried in vain to free himself.  "What the - "

One thing that had not changed from the days of the war was the way Harry's voice could remain quite level and conversational as he expressed his rage.  "Your _friends_ paid a visit to my house this evening, Justin."

"What?  I don't - "

"Don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about!  Remember your little visit a couple of weeks ago?  When you kindly informed me that my lodger could get me into trouble?"

"I don't know what - "

Harry shook him so hard that his head snapped back on his neck with an audible crack.  "Don't give me that bullshit!"  For the first time, his voice began to rise in pain and anger, frighteningly audible in the sudden, pin-drop silence.  "Your pathetic little pack of scumbag vigilantes broke into my house tonight, and when they didn't find what they were looking for, they decided to turn the place over and rob me instead!"

"It's nothing to do with me - "

Harry threw him up against a tall pillar a few steps away from the desk, making Justin grunt with pain.  "Don't you dare tell me you had nothing to do with it!  They took things that no one but friends of mine would know were there!  Who did you shoot your mouth off to, Justin?  Did it make you feel big, being able to tell them you knew all Harry Potter's secrets?"

"I - don't know - what the hell you're - talking - about," Justin wheezed.

 _"BOLLOCKS!"_ Harry seized him again, flinging him against the pillar a second time.  Justin gasped painfully.  "They took Sirius and Remus's things!  Do you remember Sirius and Remus, Justin?  Those two wizards who saved your miserable, ungrateful skin more times than I care to remember?  Two wizards who _DIED FIGHTING VOLDEMORT_ so that pathetic little shits like you and your friends could feel free to paint graffiti on their house and steal their belongings when they were gone?"

Someone grabbed him from behind, dragging him away.  Harry lashed out in his rage, but missed his captor completely.  Ron was wise to tricks like that and hung on grimly until his friend exhausted himself.  It didn't take long; Harry was too done up with rage and distress by that time.

"Come on, mate, time to go home," he said quietly, when Harry sagged.

"I don't want - "

" _No,_ Harry.  You've made your point - now go home and let me deal with our friend here."

Ron hadn't come alone; with him was their old dorm-mate Dean Thomas, also an Auror.  Ron handed Harry over to him, saying, "Take him outside, would you, Dean?  I won't be a minute."

Justin had picked himself up by the time Ron turned back to him, and he was propping himself up on the pillar with one hand.  His face was scarlet, although that probably had more to do with the humiliation he had just suffered in front of his colleagues than the roughing up Harry had given him.  It hadn't escaped Ron's notice that none of the other members of staff had come forward to help their workmate.

"Avengers of the Phoenix, Justin?" he said, when the other man had composed himself a little.  "Better hope that old Rufio Caldyx doesn't hear about this.  His people would never have dreamt of stealing from their targets, let alone harassing Harry Potter of all people."

"Fuck you, Weasley!  What would you know about it?"

Ron smiled at him nastily.  "Not much - but you can tell me all about it tomorrow, in my office.  Shall we say ten o'clock?  And don't be late - I wouldn't want to have to send anyone to pick you up."

 

*

 

Hermione and Draco had tidied up in Harry's absence.  Furniture had been righted, anything broken had been fixed, and one of the Aurors left at the house had obligingly removed the offending spray-paint from the wall outside.

Harry noticed none of this when he walked in.  He ignored the people still milling around in his hallway and went straight upstairs to his bedroom, shutting the door behind him with a very final bang.  Ron observed this sadly, and walked through to the kitchen where Hermione was waiting with Draco.

"Where did he go?" she asked at once.

"Where I thought he'd go; straight to Hogsmeade after Justin Finch-Fletchley."  Ron sighed wearily.  "Is there any tea?  I'm perished - it was freezing up there."

But it was Draco who pulled out the teabags and mugs, and started making a pot of tea.  Hermione was looking at her husband worriedly. 

"Did he make a fuss?"

"Oh, he slapped him around a bit and shook up the entire staff of the _Evening Prophet_.  It'll probably be headlines tomorrow, by which time Justin'll be spilling his guts to me if he knows what's good for him."

"Justin's a complete pillock," Dean said disgustedly from the doorway.  "What the hell possessed him to get involved with a bunch of half-baked vigilantes?"

Draco said nothing as he poured boiling water into the teapot, but he was very conscious of everyone's eyes on him. 

"I hope you're satisfied, Malfoy," Ron said to him curtly.  "I really thought Harry was starting to sort himself out, until this happened.  Now we're back to square one again."

The blond wizard looked up.  "I'm aware of your opinion, Weasley," he replied coolly.  For once his tone lacked bite as he confronted his old enemy.  "It's a little late now, but I'll move on in the morning - "

"You'll do no such thing," Ron snapped.  "If you think you can waltz in here, totally balls up Harry's life and then bugger off again, leaving us to pick up the pieces, you can think again!  You'll damn well stay put while we sort this mess out.  There'll be headlines enough tomorrow, without rumours flying around that we chased you out of Harry's home."

"Besides," Hermione put in, in a more conciliatory tone, "with the mood he's in at the moment, I really don't like the idea of Harry being left alone in the house.  Ordinarily I wouldn't ask, but since you're already living here I'd appreciate it if you'd keep an eye on him."

"You're asking _Draco Malfoy_ to look out for Harry?" Dean burst out unexpectedly.  He was incredulous.

Draco bristled slightly but managed to hold his tongue.

Hermione fixed Dean with a cool look.  "Of course, if you're volunteering instead - "

He was taken aback.  "I can't, I - my wife - "

"Thought not," she said dryly, and turned back to Draco.  "Will you do that?"

He looked at her for a moment and shrugged.  "Apparently I'm not going anywhere, so I suppose so."

 

*

 

For the next week Harry followed his usual routine, but he was withdrawn as he'd never been before.  The headlines in the _Prophet_ after his confrontation with Justin hadn't helped much.  He spent one evening with Hermione and Ron a couple of days after the break in, and when he returned home his mood seemed bleaker than ever.  Draco, who was cautiously shadowing him most of the time, was conscious of the difference.   Before, it had been quiet in the house; now it was silent. 

The easy, if somewhat acerbic banter they had been developing dried up, and Harry's behaviour at the Neverland shelter was so morose that Karen actually took Draco aside one day and asked him point-blank what was wrong.  He resisted the impulse to tell her to mind her own business, and tried to fob her off with some comment about family problems.

Karen was not impressed.  "I might not know much about Harry," she told him pointedly, "but I know a lost kid when I see one.  That man doesn't _have_ any family.  Try another one."

Draco gave her a Malfoy glare, annoyed by her persistence.  "He's having a bad week.  Is that all right with you?  Because people do have them, you know, and sometimes they can't help being a bit miserable about it."

She was equally unimpressed by the glare.  "Uh huh.  That doesn't explain why _you're_ following him around like a hen with one chick.  And you can put that face away, mister - I've taken your measure already and I'm wondering just what it is you're looking for in him."

That was going too far.  "You can meddle in Harry's life if he'll let you," Draco told her angrily, "but please refrain from interfering in mine.  You know nothing about me."

Karen snorted.  "Like I said, Blondie, I know a lost boy when I see one.  Each of you is as screwed up as the other, and it's about time you both realised that."

This encounter did not make Draco happy.  Nor did discovering, a couple of hours later, that after a morning of even more concentrated withdrawal than usual Harry had disappeared somewhere without Draco noticing.  Cursing inwardly, the blond wizard took the risk of Apparating home from the alleyway behind the shelter.  He tore into the house only to find, much to his relief, that Harry was indeed home.  His Muggle-style jacket was hanging on the end of the banister and when Draco looked, he was in his room, lying on the bed.

"Are you alright?" he demanded, more roughly than he intended.  Alarm was giving way to annoyance once more.

Harry nodded slightly.

"Do you want anything?"

A slight shake of the head.

Disconcerted by this, Draco pondered what to do.  Maybe Harry was just tired; he hadn't been sleeping much himself so he was well aware that the dark-haired wizard spent large portions of the night wandering around the house restlessly.

"I'll let you rest, then," he said finally, and when he got no response he quietly pulled the door shut and wandered back downstairs.

It took an hour or more of pointless tidying in the kitchen before Draco would admit to himself that he was worried and had been all week.  It was simply not like Harry to be quite this morose, and the brooding silences had a desperate edge that Draco recognised from a low point he himself had suffered during the year after his trial.  It was grief and disillusionment and something else he couldn't name that had led him to that place; and because he knew it from his own experiences, he was afraid of what was happening to Harry now.

 _This_ was the thing he had seen in Harry's face when he first moved into the house.  It was an indefinable something born from the aftermath of the war, a realisation perhaps that doing what one had to do was not enough, and the despair born out of that.  It was a hardened awareness that nothing you ever did would be good enough, that everything you had ever wanted had been taken from you, and that your life was a ruin.

The difference, of course, was Draco knew that to a certain extent he deserved what had happened to him.  But Harry Potter, of all people, shouldn't be going through this.

In spite of everything, he fought off an urge to contact one of the Weasleys and express his concerns.  He knew instinctively that Harry would not want that, and at this point Draco strongly felt that what Harry wanted was far more important than Hermione Weasley's need to arrange his life for him.  It took an effort to hold back, though, for Draco doubted his own ability to help Harry if a crisis came.  Karen had certainly been right on that point; he was as flaky as Harry was, in his own way.

The short autumn afternoon drifted away into early evening, and Harry showed no signs of surfacing.  To the best of Draco's knowledge, he hadn't eaten all day, so at six o'clock he made a pot of tea and took a mug of it upstairs.

Harry was still lying in exactly the same position as he had earlier.  Frowning a little, Draco put the mug on the bedside table and touched his shoulder.

"Potter.  I've brought you some tea."

No response.  He gave Harry's shoulder a gentle shake.

"Potter?  Come on, wake up."

Nothing.  Suddenly alarmed, although he wasn't sure why, Draco sat down on the edge of the bed beside him and grabbed his shoulders, giving him a much harder shake. 

"Harry!  Wake up, dammit!"

Harry was as limp as a new corpse.  Only the warmth of his skin and his faint breathing showed that he was still among the living.  When Draco released him, he slumped back against the pillows, one arm falling to his side slackly.  He might as well have been dead for all the response he made.

Panic surged up in Draco's chest.  He fumbled with the unfamiliar electrical switch on the bedside lamp until it lit up, and looked around.  The room was as spotless as it had been after he and Hermione had finished cleaning it up the week before, and there was nothing to suggest why Harry should be all but comatose.  Frustrated, Draco yanked open the drawer of the bedside table and peered inside. 

Harry's wand lay on the top of the contents, which seemed to consist mostly of neatly ironed and folded handkerchiefs.  There was a small stack of old photographs at the back awaiting re-framing, and a Muggle-style wristwatch.  And there was a small, white, plastic bottle with a neatly printed label on it. 

Draco picked the bottle up curiously.  It wasn't a wizard medicine bottle, which would have been made of something more solid, like glass or stone, and it had that machine-made look that only came with Muggle goods.  The label said PAROXETINE HYDROCHLORIDE 20MG TABLETS with some instructions underneath, along with the name of an unfamiliar doctor.  The words meant nothing to him, but the bottle appeared to be empty. 

The panic sensation exploded into horror.  An empty pill bottle and an insensible wizard did not add up to anything good in Draco's book.  Knowing that he now had no choice but to summon help, he headed for the stairs at a run.

 

*

 

Ron Weasley tumbled out of the Floo in the living room in a sharp puff of acrid soot and smoke, and had Draco not been so relieved to see him for once, he might have been alarmed – never had the Auror looked so grim.

He didn't waste time with unnecessary questions either.  "Where is he?"

"Upstairs – "

Ron was gone, taking the stairs two at a time and leaving the other man trailing behind him.  When Draco caught up with him, he was sitting on the edge of Harry's bed trying to take his friend's pulse, first at the wrist and then at his throat.  The grim lines of his face deepened as he peeled back Harry's eyelids to check his pupil response.

"How long has he been like this?" he asked curtly, over his shoulder.

"I don't know."  Draco fought with irrational guilt for a beat.  "I found him here just after lunch and spoke to him, but I thought he wanted to rest – I don't think he's been sleeping properly. But when I tried to wake him - "

"Help me to sit him up."

Between them they pulled Harry upright, but he slumped against Draco's shoulder like a rag-doll.  Ron began to slap his face.  "Harry!  Harry - come on, mate, wake up."  When that didn't work, Ron seized Harry's left hand and began to rub his thumb across the palm in an attempt to stimulate his friend into waking.

There was the sound of footsteps on the staircase and Hermione burst into the room, still wearing a potion-stained work robe.

"What happened?" she demanded breathlessly.

"Looks like he took something," Ron told her shortly.  He picked up the pill bottle from the bedside table, gave it an uncomprehending look and handed it to his wife.  "We're not sure how long he's been like this, but it could have been most of the afternoon."

She studied the bottle with dismay.  "This is a Muggle drug."

"His pulse is slow and his pupils are dilated.  Can we try a Detoxification Charm?"

Hermione shook her head.  "Not without knowing what the drug is for – it could make things worse.  I'll have to get my Dad to identify this for me, Ron, it's not one I'm familiar with.  Keep trying to wake him – I won't be long."

She disappeared out of the door again, taking the little bottle with her, and leaving Ron and Draco to continue what seemed like futile efforts to wake Harry.

"How did he end up like this?" Ron demanded.  "How did he get so low so fast?  We only saw him on Tuesday and he seemed alright then – not brilliant but alright."

"He didn't seem 'alright' to me when he got back from your place," Draco retorted.  He resented Ron's tone which seemed just shy of accusatory.  "He looked as miserable as sin and he's barely spoken two words together since.  Maybe _I_ should be asking _you_ why – "

He saw at once from Ron's expression that he'd scored some kind of direct hit.  The redhead was instantly distressed.  "Damn - we shouldn't have told him.  But I didn't know, I thought it might cheer him up …."

"Shouldn't have told him what?" demanded Draco.

Ron gave him a strange look.  "Never mind."

"Great.  You won't tell me what set him off, but you expect me to help you pick up the pieces!"

"It's none of your business, Malfoy - "

"Excuse me, but I think it _is_ my business," Draco snapped bitterly.  "Your wife made it my business when she asked me to keep an eye on him.  What are you planning to do if and when he wakes up?  Take him home with you instead?  Or leave him here and hope for the best?"

For a moment he thought Ron might say something really sharp, but the Auror had better control of himself than that.  He clamped his lips together in a thin line and instead put Harry's hand down and stood up.  Yanking the lace undone briskly, he tugged Harry's left boot and sock off and grabbed his foot, running his thumbnail up the arch.

For the first time, there was a reaction; Harry's foot jerked feebly and he twitched, making a low sound of protest in his throat.

"That's more like it!" Ron exclaimed, relieved.  He returned to Harry's side and began gently slapping his face again.  "Harry … _Harry!_   Come on, wake up.  What did you take?"

Harry didn't respond but in a remarkably short space of time Hermione returned, breathless and still clutching the little bottle.

"Well?" Ron demanded as she hurried in.

"It's an antidepressant," she puffed, and she sat down on the end of the bed, peering at Harry anxiously.  "How is he?"

"Groggy - very groggy."

"I'm not surprised.  It's not really possible to overdose on this drug, but it's not a good idea for wizards to take it either.  I can't believe Harry was silly enough to go to a Muggle doctor in the first place - "

"Can't you?"  Draco shot her a disgusted look.  "Where else would he go, Granger?  He's the Boy Who Lived - if he went to a wizard medic, it would have been all over the front page of the _Daily Prophet_ the following morning, and sod patient confidentiality."

Hermione sighed.  "He'll probably sleep this off by the morning, but a slow-acting Detoxification Charm would help.  Let's do that and let him sleep for a while.  I don't know about either of you, but I could do with a cup of tea.  And we need to talk."

On that ominous phrase, she took out her wand and pointed it at Harry.

 

*

 

The previous pot of tea had gone cold during the drama.  Draco threw it away and set the kettle to boil to make another one.  He searched the cupboard for two spare mugs, and after a moment or two found a couple pushed to the back, one saying "Black Dog!" in big cheerful letters and the other all black with a pair of cartoon amber eyes on the side.  He had an uncomfortable feeling that these mugs had belonged to Sirius Black and Remus Lupin, but what Harry wasn't around to see he couldn't get upset over, so Draco set them down on the counter-top.

Hermione had taken a seat at the kitchen table, but Ron was pacing restlessly.  When he saw the mugs, he stopped and frowned. 

"I don't think you should - "

"It's either those or jam jars," Draco interrupted.  "Take your pick." 

What he wasn't about to tell Ron was that only the day before he'd discovered several pounds of smashed crockery in the kitchen rubbish bin.  Harry had owned plenty of mugs, even after the raid, but now the cupboard was nearly bare.  Besides, from the distressed look on Hermione's face, she had already worked it out for herself.

He poured the tea.  As soon as the hot liquid touched the two mugs, the amber eyes on the first started blinking and the other mug began to growl like a playful puppy.

"Typical," he muttered, as he handed them over.  "Alright.  You wanted to talk.  Talk."

Hermione set the empty plastic pill bottle on the kitchen table.  "This is – _was_ – an antidepressant," she said.  "It has some other effects as well, like sorting out sleeping problems.  There was three months' supply in there and it was prescribed just over two months ago.  It usually takes a week or so to take effect."

"Obviously it wasn't working," Draco commented sardonically.

She glanced up at him.  "No.  If anything, it was probably making him feel worse.  Wizards aren't like Muggles and often respond very badly to Muggle medicines, but Harry clearly didn't know that."

"Did he take nearly a month's worth of this crap in one go?" Ron asked impatiently.

Hermione hesitated.  "He could have been increasing the dosage for a while, if he thought it wasn't working," she offered.  "Despite appearances, he didn't necessarily take a deliberate overdose today.  It could have built up and built up until he collapsed."  But she didn't sound convinced.  "Malfoy, has he seemed, I don't know, confused or sick over the last few weeks?"

"No," Draco said, a little reluctantly.  "He seemed reasonably cheerful until the house was turned over.  Then he went downhill in a big way." 

"It's just that he _must_ have been feeling really bad if he went to a doctor," she persisted.  "I know Harry – he never asks for help unless it's a last resort."

Draco felt a twitch of annoyance again.  "What I want to know is why he didn't tell the pair of you that he was feeling like this.  You're supposed to be his friends!"

Ron made a strange sound, and suddenly he turned and stalked out of the kitchen.  Hermione watched him go sadly, but didn't try to stop him. 

"Harry doesn't tell us things like that," she replied quietly, after a moment's silence.  "He doesn't want to create problems or be a nuisance to people, and he has this morbid fear of intruding into our lives in any way.  Nothing Ron and I say makes any difference, and if I try to talk to him about how miserable he seems, he changes the subject or starts fussing.  It took me months just to convince him to get a lodger because he kept avoiding the subject or talking around it."

He stared at her incredulously.  "This was _your_ idea?"

Hermione nodded.  "I thought it might be company for him, or at least give him something else to think about when he's not at that wretched shelter, listening to other people's problems.  He broods so much."

"Marvellous!"  Draco struggled to think of a way to express his feelings on this but couldn't, so he changed the subject.  "What did the pair of you tell him the other evening that set him off like this?  He was ten times worse when he got back from your house."

She winced.  "I had no idea – we thought there was a chance he might not take it well, but on the other hand he could have been delighted.  You never know with Harry ... and he seemed happy enough when he left us."

"You of all people should know better than that," Draco told her angrily.  "I might not know much about him, but even I can see that he bottles everything up!  But what the hell did you tell him?"

Hermione looked down at her hands, which were cradling the softly growling Black Dog mug.  "I'm pregnant.  He had to know sometime, it's not like I could hide it."

"Oh shit."  Draco suddenly sat down, feeling very weary.  He could see only too easily what had happened now.  Then he ran over what Hermione had just said and realised that the phrasing was a little ... odd.  He turned sharply to look at her.  "Granger, are you aware that Potter's gay?"

"My God, did _he_ tell you that?"  She looked up at him, startled.

"Yes, he did.  But did _you_ already know?"

"Of course – "

"And does Weasley?"

Hermione gave him a sour look.  "I can see where this is going.  Yes, Malfoy, I'm well aware that Harry fell for Ron.  I knew that a long time ago, long before we married.  But it was never an issue between Harry and me; he knew that Ron didn't feel the same way."

Draco raised a brow at her.  He thought this statement was a little strange, but didn't say so.  "I repeat: Does he know?"

There was a pause, and she looked away.  "Yes, he does."  Her voice was oddly constricted.  "But it's never mentioned between them."

"Harry thinks he _doesn't_ know."

She gave an angry little laugh.  "No, that's just a ridiculous pretence, to avoid them having to talk about it like adults.  God forbid they should actually have a conversation about feelings!  They think if they pretend it isn't happening, they can still be friends and preserve their masculine pride and dignity.  Even if it ends up killing one of them."

"Is that what you think happened this afternoon?"  Draco couldn't keep the cynical dryness out of his voice, and didn't try.  He wasn't going to sit there and listen to Harry's depression being blamed on unrequited lust for Ron Weasley. 

"No," Hermione snapped defensively, "but I think it's part of it." 

Ron reappeared in the doorway.  He had recovered his composure, and the rather vague mask was back in place.  "He's still asleep," he reported, leaning against the lintel, "but it looks a bit more natural now."

Draco ignored the comment, looking from one to the other thoughtfully.  "What are we going to do?" he asked.

" _We?_ " asked Ron, dryly.

"Last I heard, I didn't have your gracious permission to leave this house," he retorted, "so under the circumstances, yes, I think it's _we_ , don't you?"

"Developing a conscience, Malfoy?"

"Manifestly I already had one, unlike some – "

"Don't start," Hermione said wearily, "either of you.  And for the record I don't know what to do now.  I'll try talking to him when he wakes up, but I don't suppose it'll do any good."

Ron rubbed the side of his nose reflectively.  "If it was anyone else, I'd be talking about St. Mungo's now, but that's no good for Harry.  Like Malfoy said, it'd be all over the _Daily Prophet_ before you could say "Nox", and that's always supposing you could get him to talk to anyone there in the first place.  I wouldn't lay any substantial bets on it, personally, and I'm not about to force him.  We'll be lucky if he talks to either of us."

"In which case," Draco put in, standing up, "I have a suggestion to make."

Ron eyed him warily.  "Go on."

"It's late.  Go home.  I'll keep an eye on him tonight, and probably by tomorrow you'll have thought of something."

He was aware even as he said it that the suggestion was a little too smooth, and Hermione looked at him with the most unflattering suspicion.

"I don't want to sound rude, Malfoy, but really – why the sudden hurry to take on responsibility for Harry's welfare?"

 _Because right now I think you two are the last people he wants to see when he wakes up,_ he thought. 

Clearly the same idea had not crossed Hermione's reputedly brilliant mind, although Ron was curiously silent.  Draco glanced at him now and wondered what was going on behind the bland expression.  Over the last few years he'd learned an unwilling respect for the redheaded Auror and had taken care never to put himself in a position where the youngest Weasley son had grounds to pull him in for questioning.  For heaven's sake, the man had taken out Madam Lestrange during the course of her second rampage in Voldemort's entourage – no mean feat.  The witch had been a howling psychopath by the time the Dark Lord had freed her and her husband from Azkaban.

"It occurs to me that what has to be said to Harry now would be better said by someone a little less close to him," he replied finally, choosing his words.  "There would be less hurt feelings all round."

There was a pause.  Hermione looked a little indignant at Draco's statement, but Ron leaned up against the doorpost and regarded him thoughtfully.

"You think there's something on his mind that he doesn't want to discuss with us?"

Draco looked him right in the eye.  "I think there are probably a lot of things he doesn't want to talk to you about.  He might talk to me, though.  I'm not a friend of his and he can say what he likes to me."

Ron snorted.  "He won't!  He's too bloody nice; that's part of his problem."

"I think you're forgetting who you're talking to," Draco pointed out sardonically.  "He has no reason to be nice to me – "

"And yet he is.  I wonder why?"

"The renowned Gryffindor sense of responsibility, no doubt," he replied.  He had no intention of discussing his relationship with Harry – if that was the word – with Ron.  "Either way, I strongly doubt he'll be in the mood to bother being nice when he finally wakes up.  Which is another good reason for the two of you to be out of the way when it happens; one wouldn't want the famous trio to suffer a rift just because Harry feels less than diplomatic after this ... hiccup."

"I think we're both perfectly capable of ignoring any irrational comments Harry might make when he's not feeling himself," Hermione said sharply.

Draco's temper began to wear thin.  "Maybe so, but I don't think _Harry_ is capable of ignoring it," he retorted.  "Besides, the last thing he needs right now is you fussing over and mothering him, Granger – "

"And what makes you an expert on what Harry needs?" asked Ron.  The question was less barbed than Draco had expected and there was an odd note of curiosity in it.  His eyes were studying him with unexpected interest.

Draco shot him a poisonous look, annoyed at letting even the tiniest morsel of information about himself slip out in front of Ron Weasley of all people.  "None of your business, Weasley, and will the pair of you _please_ just piss off already?"

He had the satisfaction of seeing Hermione turn scarlet with fury at this, but Ron continued to look at him with that blandly thoughtful expression which was really becoming quite disturbing.  Then he nodded just once, and turned to his wife. 

"Come on.  I think it's time we left."

She gaped at him.  "But Ron!  Harry – "

" – Will be fine.  Malfoy's right, it's probably better that we're not around when he wakes up."

If anything, she looked even more staggered.  "Could you repeat that, because I could have sworn I just heard you say "Malfoy's right" ...."

Ron took her arm firmly and steered her out into the hall.  "Floo, love, now.  No arguments."

Hermione muttered all the way to the fireplace in the living room, and threw Draco the darkest of looks before she disappeared up the chimney.  Ron watched her leave –

\- and suddenly Draco found himself thrown up against the wall beside the fireplace, with the Auror's forearm pressed painfully across his larynx.  It had happened so quickly that he had no time to go for his wand or make any other defensive manoeuvre; he was stunned at the speed of Ron's move. 

Ron's hazel eyes blazed, but his tone remained quite conversational.  "I'm trusting you, Malfoy.  If anything happens to Harry – anything at all – I swear my colleagues won't find enough of you to identify.  Is that clear?"

Madam Lestrange had been spread across the breadth of the main street at Hogsmeade after her encounter with Ron Weasley, and there had been rumours after the event that some parts of her had never been found.  Aurors always aimed not to kill their quarry, but when they were forced to it was invariably messy.

"Understood," Draco wheezed, and the pressure let up.  He rubbed his throat and watched resentfully as Ron stepped back to the fireplace and casually tossed a pinch of Floo powder into the flames. 

"Let me know how he is tomorrow," he said, glancing at Draco, and he coolly stepped into the fireplace and was gone.

 


	3. Chapter 3

It was nearly midnight before Harry woke again.  When he did, Draco was sitting in a chair beside his bed, quietly reading in the low light of a wizard lamp on the bedside table; true to his kind, he was not at ease with Harry's Muggle electrical devices.

He looked up when Harry stirred and quietly closed the book, putting it on the side of the bed.  "How are you feeling?"

Harry stared at him dully for several moments.  "Okay," he managed finally.

"Want a drink?"

He thought about it, and nodded.  Draco disappeared for ten minutes or so, and when he returned he was carrying two large mugs of tea. 

"I have an idea I'm supposed to give you a lecture about drinking pints and pints of water to flush that Muggle-made crap out of your system, but let's take that as read," the blond wizard commented, as he put Harry's mug on the table.

Harry blinked at him.  "What do you mean?"

Draco paused and regarded him with a raised brow.  " _Hello_ , Harry – you do realise you've been comatose for a good twelve hours, don't you?"

"I have?"

"Hm."  Draco pulled the plastic pill bottle out of his pocket and tossed it onto the bed next to Harry.  He sat down again and looked at the other man.  "Does that ring any bells?"

Harry picked it up slowly and looked at it.  "Oh.  That.  I took some earlier, but I don't know why I bothered.  They don't work."  It seemed to take an unnaturally long time to get his hand up to his face to rub his eyes. 

"That's because Muggle medicines are very bad for wizards," Draco commented dryly.  "How many did you take?"

"Um … I'm not sure."  And Harry really wasn't sure; he remembered feeling very desperate when he opened the bottle, but he had no clear recollection of how many pills had fallen into his hand.

"Try 'all of them'."

Silence. 

"I don't remember that," Harry said finally.  Shit.  Oh, _shit_ ….

"Do you remember me speaking to you?"  He shook his head silently.  "Do you remember Weasley and I trying to wake you up a few hours ago?"

"No."  Another pause.  "Does he think I tried to off myself?"

"Something like that, yes."  Draco folded his arms and looked at him neutrally.  "I'll admit the idea crossed my mind rather forcefully too."

"Are you thinking that now?"

"I don't know.  I'll accept that it might have been an accident this time, but I also think that the idea wasn't far from your mind.  Am I right?"

Harry looked at him.  How the hell was he supposed to answer a question like that?  If he said 'yes', he'd look like a self-pitying lunatic.  If he said 'no', he wouldn't be believed.

"What do you think?" he asked instead.

"I've just told you what I think.  Drink your tea." 

Harry slowly, painfully slowly, dragged himself a little more upright and lifted the mug unsteadily to his lips.  The wobble in his hand wasn't entirely due to the after-effects of the overdose.  Ron thought he'd tried to kill himself, and worse, he couldn't say with absolute certainty that it hadn't been in his mind when he'd taken those pills at lunchtime.

"I didn't mean to do it," he muttered, and was dismayed to feel a sudden hot sting at the back of his eyes.

"No, I don't suppose you did."  Draco's expression remained noncommittal.  "If you'd really intended to kill yourself, there are dozens of more reliable ways than swallowing a handful of Muggle pills.  Although you could have inadvertently poisoned yourself with them anyway, you idiot.  Didn't anyone ever tell you that Muggle medicine doesn't work on wizards?"

"I don't know," Harry replied quietly.  "Maybe.  I don't remember."

"Remember it for future reference.  There are perfectly effective potions for depression, you know – why didn't you try them?"

Harry felt a spark of anger at this.  "I'm not a particularly adept potion maker myself, so I would have had to go to a mediwizard to get them.  I might just as well give a statement about my mental health directly to the _Daily Prophet_!"  The anger suddenly drained out of him again, leaving him feeling empty and cold.  "Besides, with my history if I admitted to a mediwizard that I was depressed and suicidal, I might have to give up my wand until they could guarantee I wasn't a danger to anyone."

He put his half empty mug back on the bedside table, and slid down the bed until his head was on the pillow again.  He wanted nothing more than to slip back into that drugged sleep.  He didn't want to think about what he had done, or nearly done, or why he had done it.

"What made you suddenly come home and take those pills?" Draco's voice asked, quiet but persistent.

Harry shrugged.  "I don't know."  After a moment, he added, "I felt like crap.  But I always feel like crap."

"Crap enough to kill yourself?"

"No – yes - no.  No."

"You weren't like this before those fools broke in here.  You weren't even like this before you went to see Weasley and Granger the other evening."

"Shut up," Harry whispered.  His eyes stung again, and he blinked angrily to clear them.  "What's it to you anyway?"

"It must have hurt when all your friends walked away and left you."

Harry screwed his eyes shut as tightly as he could.  "Not as much as it hurt when Sirius and Remus were killed," he forced out.

But that was a lie.  Sirius, Remus, Dumbledore, Hagrid, his parents ... they never felt more than a touch away.  The dead had never abandoned him.  It was the living who had turned their backs, one way or another, leaving him feeling more alone than he ever had, even before his eleventh birthday.

"It must have hurt even more when Weasley rejected you."

Something in his chest became tight and painful.  "He didn't reject me.  He never knew – "

"Bollocks.  He knew all along, and you know it.  He and his precious wife rubbed your nose in it the other evening, didn't they?  I can just imagine!  _We're going to have a baby, aren't you glad?_ "

"Shut up."  The tight, painful thing was threatening to burst right out of his chest.  "He's my best friend.  They both are."

"I'm pretty sceptical of friends," Draco told him flatly.  "They have this odd habit of not being there for you when you most need them."

Something cracked and broke inside Harry, and try as he might he couldn't stop hot tears leaking out from under his eyelids.  Then the side of the bed dipped and firm hands pulled him upright.  He fought them.

"Leave me alone – "

"Not a chance."

He continued to struggle against the confining arms for a moment or two, but didn't have the energy to keep fighting and finally slumped against Draco's shoulder.  Tears poured down his face and he was helpless to stop them.

"What do you care, Malfoy?" he whispered.

The voice in his ear was very quiet and stripped of all its usual sarcasm.  "I _care_ because you did the right thing and the wizarding world screwed you over for it.  Just like me."

"Is that a reason?"

"What more do you want?"

"I don't know," Harry replied dully.

Silence.  Then the voice became even softer.  "You gave me a home.  You treated me like a person.  You didn't have to, but you did.  The least I can do in return is make sure you don't do to yourself what I did not so long ago.  You don't deserve that, Harry Potter."

Harry wondered what he meant by that but didn't have the strength to ask.  Instead he said, "I _am_ happy for them.  Really and truly.  It's just ... I wanted ...."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"Yes.  Not a very noble feeling, is it, Gryffindor, hating the people you love?  Trust me, I know a lot about that."

 

*

 

Sleeping in your clothes only seems like a good idea when you're too tired to get up and take them off.  By the next morning they are sweaty and stinking and trying to choke the life out of you, as Harry discovered when he awoke to find weak fingers of light creeping through the curtains and a wizard lamp burning low on his nightstand.  He was covered with a heavy blanket, which was just as well because in late November and with no central heating, the house was very cold.  And there was a second warm body under the blanket with him, which came as something of a surprise.

He had never seen Draco Malfoy asleep before.  Years of isolation within his own community had etched lines into the blond wizard's face that were not there when he was awake and guarding himself, and he didn't looked relaxed as he slept.  There was a tiny frown between the pale brows that gave him a worried look.

Harry wondered how often he allowed himself to sleep deeply like this, and guessed not often.  Sleeping with one hand on his wand had probably become a habit for him.  Ron had said that Malfoy's name was mud in so many places; he had to wonder where the next curse was coming from.

And yet although he sympathised with Draco's situation, he couldn't find it in himself to blame the wizard community either.  They had lived under the shadow of Voldemort and his Death Eaters for too many years, and the war had been brutal.  Harry doubted there was a family in the entire community who hadn't lost someone to the horror, and in the latter part of the war he had done his share of burying the dead with what little ceremony could be afforded.

For better or worse, Draco Malfoy had once been a Death Eater and although the Dark Mark had faded to the merest shadow on his arm, like Harry's faded scar it would always be a part of him.

Grey eyes snapped open and stared back at Harry, nose to nose.  "What are you looking at, Potter?" he rasped.

"Sorry."  But Harry didn't move.  "Why did you stay?"

"Why didn't you kick me out?"

Which was a fair point.

Harry turned onto his back.  His shirt tried to strangle him and he fought with the top button until Draco slapped his hand out of the way and undid it for him – just the one, mercifully.  _Something_ had changed between them, but Harry wasn't ready to examine it yet.  Draco seemed to be the one with all the clever words; he could start that conversation if he wanted to and Harry might even be up to finishing it, but he wasn't willing to bet on it right now.

"How are you feeling?"

Harry considered the question.  "Dunno."  He wondered if he should say something about his midnight angst-fest, but couldn't think of anything.  'Thank you' seemed like entirely the wrong thing to say, and he had an idea that it wouldn't go down very well.  "A bit dopey, maybe."

"I'm not surprised."

There was a long, rather thoughtful silence, but it wasn't uncomfortable.  Harry was trying to remember if today was one of the days when he was supposed to be at the shelter, when Draco suddenly said, "Tell me something."

Harry turned apprehensive eyes towards him.  "What?"

"How did you kill Lord Voldemort?"

Not a question Harry had been expecting.  For some reason, people _didn't_ ask how the Dark Lord had been vanquished.  They were just as afraid of speaking his name, of asking questions about his demise, as they had been when Harry was a boy.  No enterprising reporter from the _Daily Prophet_ had tried to get the scoop on that story.

He moistened his lips.  "There was a spell Dumbledore constructed ...."  Dumbledore and _he_ had constructed, between them.  Not that the details mattered.  "Eight people had to maintain it.  He trained everyone in how to do it, in case some of the eight were taken out too soon."  Four of them had been; Dumbledore himself, Arthur Weasley, Padma Patil and Fleur Delacour.

"Was that what did it?"

"No."  That was what made Harry so bitter about the whole thing.  "It was just a distraction.  The spell didn't do anything, it just looked like it might.  It made Voldemort concentrate on the spell instead of one person in particular."  Him, of course.  Him and Dumbledore, and he'd got Dumbledore just the same.  And it hadn't been a clean kill, no _Avada Kedavra_ , just a brutal dismemberment spell packed with all the hate one thwarted wizard could muster.

"So how _did_ you kill him?"

Harry wondered if Draco would appreciate the irony of it.  "I shot him with a revolver.  Just an ordinary, Muggle-type handgun – a Smith and Wesson .357."  _Dirty Harry,_ Dean Thomas had joked beforehand.  He'd practised for months to make his aim perfect.  "Five rounds through the torso ... he was still trying to curse me when I put the last one through his head."  He stared vaguely up at the ceiling.  "Even then I wondered if he would actually die."

And even then, with those hate-filled dead eyes staring up at him accusingly, Harry had found it within him to regret it.  Not for Voldemort himself, but for Tom Riddle, the half-Muggle boy abandoned by his parents to be raised in a Muggle orphanage.  They'd had things in common, and but for a slip of fate Harry could have gone the same way.  There had been no Hagrid to rescue Tom Riddle, no Dumbledore, no loving Weasley family, no Sirius or Remus.  No one to tell him that the heritage of Salazar Slytherin didn't have to be cruelty and death.

"A Muggle revolver," Draco murmured thoughtfully, and suddenly he spat out a bitter laugh.  "Fitting!  He would have hated that."

Harry said nothing.  It would be pointless, he supposed, to say that he had hated it too.  Many horrors walked through his dreams; Voldemort's death wasn't the worst, but it was close.  Taking a life, any life, was a terrible thing.  He had been exposed to cold-blooded murder at an early, impressionable age and the memory of Cedric Diggory's frozen look of surprise would never leave him.  In training himself to use that gun, he had put himself through mental torture every time he set eyes on it and he hadn't been afraid to let other people see how much it bothered him.  Dean's joke on the subject had been the first and the last.

"Seems weird that Voldemort should have been so afraid of death," he said, to fill a silence that threatened to grow awkward.  "Doesn't it?"

"You think?"  Draco looked at him.  "Aren't you afraid to die?"

Harry shook his head.  "There's no point, is there?  It's going to happen sometime, and I can't do much to stop it.  Besides, Dumbledore thought that if you looked at it in the right way, it was just the next great adventure."

"Dumbledore _would_."  Draco studied him for a moment.  "It wasn't death Voldemort feared, you know.  He was more afraid of losing control, of having to hand things over to someone else.  Control meant everything to him."

Harry turned his head slightly to stare back at him.  "Why did you leave him?"  Silence.  "Why did you turn your father over to the Aurors?"

The grey eyes never wavered in their intense study of him, as though Draco was weighing up whether he was worthy to hear the answer.

At length he replied, "I left Voldemort _because_ of his need to control everything.  He wasn't content with service and devotion; he expected his followers to submit everything to him, right down to their last thought.  I couldn't live like that and, unlike my father, I couldn't pretend.  I wanted more than the pair of them were prepared to allow me to have.  I wanted ...."  He paused, visibly considering his words. 

"I looked at what Voldemort was doing and I found I didn't like the shape of it.  I'd been raised on the ideal that a pureblood wizarding world would be a better place – a new world order of strength and power in the hands of the elite.  My mother made it seem like a thing of beauty, my rightful birthright ....  But I didn't see that in Voldemort's designs.  There was an ugliness to what he was doing that didn't match my ideals, and I couldn't see how my vision of a better, more empowered wizard race fitted into what he was doing.  He took powerful men – men like my father – and treated them like servants.  He made them scramble and fight for favour and laughed at their efforts.  And it didn't take long for me to see that although he had power, he wasn't prepared to share it.  There _was_ nopureblood elite under him, only people who served his wishes and did his dirty work.  I had a vision of our race being wealthy and powerful and happy, but under Voldemort there was nothing but fear.

"Everything changed when he rose again, Potter, did you know that?  I bragged to you on the train home that summer, but when I actually arrived home I found my mother sitting in the middle of our staircase while the servants raced around the Manor, preparing it ....  I asked who was coming to stay, and she told me that _he_ was – she never named him, she didn't have to – and I realised that she was afraid.  And she stayed afraid until the day she died."

Draco rolled onto his back, like Harry, and stared up at the ceiling.  He added, inconsequentially, "Some visits were worse than others."

Harry could imagine.  Purely by chance, he and Ron had been present at a Dark Council once, and it had been one of the most terrifying experiences he had ever had.  How they hadn't been caught he didn't know.

After a while, Draco continued, "As you probably know, my mother committed suicide, and that was when I decided enough was enough.  I held my father responsible – he could have shielded her more, encouraged Voldemort's visits less ....  Listened to her when she begged him to keep a greater distance.  But Voldemort meant more to him than she did."  Another pause.  "He even missed her funeral.  I never forgave him for that.  So I gathered up as many of his papers as I could, for evidence, and gave myself up to old Mad-Eye Moody.  The rest you know."

There was more to it than that, Harry felt sure.  He also felt sure that this was as much as he was going to hear from Draco on the subject, for today at least.

There was a long, amicable silence.  Harry supposed it should have felt awkward or uncomfortable lying there together in the same bed, but strangely enough it didn't  They had gone past the point of discomfort.

Then Draco slowly sat up, rubbing his face.  "May I borrow your owl to send a message?  I promised Weasley I'd let him know if I killed you in the night."

"Maybe I should send him a note or something too."  Harry dragged himself into a sitting position too.  "I suppose I should get up ... take a shower."  The thought wasn't terribly appealing, but Draco was nodding.

"We're going to need to get a move on if we're going to get to Diagon Alley before the crowds become insufferable."

" _Are_ we going to Diagon Alley?"

"Of course.  Where else are we going to get potion ingredients?"

Harry wondered if he was being unusually thick.  "Potion ingredients?"

Draco sighed.  "Look, Potter, if you don't want to go to a wizard doctor for antidepressant potions, then we're going to have to brew them ourselves, aren't we?  And I'll need to visit Flourish and Blotts as well, unless your godfather left a copy of _Potions For Mind, Body and Spirit_ in his study."

 

*

 

They went to Flourish and Blotts first.

Given the interest stirred up by the article about Harry's attack on Justin Finch-Fletchley, Draco persuaded him to dress as a wizard for once, making him a little less conspicuous than usual.  The concealing robes and hooded cloaks were also useful in Draco's case, hiding his signature blond hair while they were in the street, and once they were inside the bookshop he was quick to whisk them both up the stairs and behind a bookshelf.

"We're looking for medical potions books," he murmured to Harry, as he ran his fingertips along the shelves.  "Professor Snape wrote a particularly useful one just before the war, so you try looking for his works while I try a couple of the more traditional authors ...."

Bemused at the idea of Snape writing medical books, Harry nevertheless did as he was asked.  It wasn't the simple task it seemed.  Flourish and Blotts were as eccentric as every other wizard institution; while the books were set out in apparently logical topic groups, they _weren't_ laid out in alphabetical or author order but rather in some fashion known only to the staff – year of publication possibly, or according to which subjects or theories were currently popular ....

Harry was on his knees, peering at the floor level shelf, when he was suddenly conscious that a pair of black booted feet had stopped in front of him.  He slowly looked up.  Black boots.  Black, all-concealing robes and cloak.  Black waistcoat, black shirt, black cravat ... dark eyes, hooked nose, sallow skin and lank black hair liberally streaked with silver.  And a familiar look of disapproval.

"Mister _Potter_ ," the well-known, deep, sinister voice remarked almost gently. 

Harry smiled weakly and scrambled to his feet, feeling about twelve years old again.  "Headmaster."

A brow rose at the title.  "There must be something quite remarkable down there for it to bring Harry Potter to his knees."

 _Ouch._   Snape had a real and evil genius for finding Harry's sore spots and sticking a claw into them. 

"Actually, Sir, I was looking for your collected works ...."  And considering that this was the absolute truth, it was remarkable how impertinent it sounded.

"Indeed."  The word was frosty.  Then Snape's eyes slid past Harry to rest upon Draco's cloaked figure a few shelves away.  "Dear me.  And Mister Malfoy too.  How ... unusual."

Right on cue, Draco walked towards Harry, engrossed in a volume.  "Harry, I think this might be what we're looking for – oh!"  He looked at Snape, disconcerted and instantly uneasy.  "Good morning, Professor."

"Draco," Snape acknowledged dryly.  He reached out and twitched the book from the younger man's fingers, examining the title on the spine.  " _Potions To Soothe The Mind?_   Are you contemplating making such a potion, Mr. Malfoy?"

Draco tensed, but kept his composure with an effort.  "As it happens, yes.  An antidepressant potion.  Perhaps you could recommend a suitable recipe, Sir?"

There was a pause as Snape's enigmatic eyes studied the two of them, lingering particularly on Harry.  Then he turned and studied the shelves next to him for a moment, before pulling out a small, fat, leather-bound volume and holding it out to Draco.  "You should find all you require in that," he commented coolly.  "There are at least five separate recipes, some stronger than others.  Read the instructions carefully.  If the milder recipes prove ineffective, try something a little stronger.  If you encounter problems, you may write to me at Hogwarts for further advice."

"Thank you – "

Snape waved this off.  "Good day, gentlemen."  And he walked briskly past them to the stairs.

Harry looked at Draco.  "Well ... that was unexpected."

"Useful though.  I'd forgotten this book."  Draco handed it to him, relaxing fractionally.  "Here, you'd better pay for it.  If I go to the till, they might throw me out of the shop."

"They'd better not," Harry grumbled, but he paid for the book all the same.

He was aware of eyes on the pair of them as they left Flourish and Blotts, and began to feel a resurgence of the anger he'd felt the night his house had been broken into, but no one actually said anything and they carried on up the narrow, crooked street unmolested. 

It took trips to three different apothecaries before they found all the ingredients Draco thought they might need.  One of the storekeepers had been particularly unhelpful as soon as he clapped eyes on the blond wizard, leading Harry to read him the riot act on the spot.  It hadn't made a whit of difference to the man's attitude, and by the time they'd bought everything neither of them was able to ignore the tangible attention of the crowds when they stepped out of the final shop. 

It was difficult to say if the mood of the many watching people was unfriendly or merely curious.  Whatever it was, the atmosphere was uncomfortably oppressive.

"I think we should head for the nearest Floo point and leave," Draco murmured to him tensely.  Apparating was unfortunately not an option for Harry after his near-miss with the pills the night before.

"Or alternatively you could join me in my office for a cup of tea," a new voice suggested.

Harry whipped around.  "Ron!"

The redheaded Auror was leaning against the door-post of the apothecary's shop.  He smiled, although his eyes were studying Harry a little anxiously.  "I've been looking for you," he said, "not that you've been all that hard to locate," and he threw a pointed look at some of the nearer loiterers, who suddenly decided to make themselves scarce.  His eyes returned to the pair of them, wandering over Draco in particular.  "You're causing a bit of a stir," he commented.

"Unavoidable," Draco replied coolly.

"Hm."  Ron turned back to Harry.  "Spare me twenty minutes?"

"Of course."

But it was an uncomfortable walk back down the street to the Ministry buildings.

At length, Ron said, "I wasn't expecting to see you out and about.  How are you feeling today?"

"Okay."  Harry felt acutely embarrassed.  "You know, I didn't mean ... it wasn't deliberate."

"If you say so, I believe you.  But that's a hell of a mistake to make, Harry."

"I wasn't feeling so good when I took those pills.  It was an accident, that's all."

"But why were you taking them in the first place?"

Harry felt a twinge of anger.  "If you have to ask, what's the point in me telling you?"  Then he felt bad for being so sharp.  "I'm sorry, I didn't – "

"Stop apologising!"  Ron sounded quite exasperated.  "You're right, after all.  I should have seen what was going on – in fact I _did_ see it, but it's so hard to know how to help you when you won't let me!"

Harry began to wish he'd stayed at home.  He felt lousy enough already, without quarrelling with Ron on top of everything else.  "I don't _want_ people to feel they have to help me – "

Ron spat out a word that he had to have learned from his brother Charlie, and Harry stared at him, astonished.  Even Draco looked a little impressed.

"It's not a sodding obligation, Harry!  When will you realise that I happen to _like_ having you around in my life?  How many people did we have to bury because of the war?  No, don't bother answering that – if you want I can list them, names, dates, cemeteries, cause of death, the lot.  I can tell you that because most of them pay me visits at night, and if _I'm_ dreaming about them after all this time, then I know youmust be."  Ron took an angry breath and plunged on.  "Listen to me, mate – I don't want to have to bury you as well, accidentally or otherwise.  Not until you're at least a hundred and my great-grandkids have had a chance to torment the hell out of you."

Harry didn't get a chance to reply to this, as they arrived at the Ministry then, but it was just as well because he didn't know what he could say to Ron in response.  Instead, more than a little subdued, he followed the other man into the dim confines of the building and through the imposing oak-panelled corridors to the offices of the Magical Law Enforcement Department, where the Aurors were currently located.

In the aftermath of the war, the civilian law agency had been decimated and demoralised.  Martial law was lifted, but in the wake of Voldemort's second and more terrifying campaign, administration of magical law was deemed to be of greater importance.  Consequently, the Law Enforcement Division was disbanded and the jurisdiction of the Aurors extended to take its place.  These days Ron's people had significantly more power, something Harry was ambivalent about.  To do Ron justice, he was doubtful of it too; the current crop of Aurors were all good people, but that didn't mean it would always be the case.

Harry knew quite a lot of the men and women they passed as they walked through the offices.  Ron's current sidekick was the reliable Dean Thomas.  Originally Seamus Finnigan had worked with them too, but like Harry his war wounds had left him unfit for the work and he was now a representative for Ogdens, the wizard brewers and distillers.  Today Dean was nowhere to be seen and Harry asked where he was.

"Interviewing someone," Ron replied briefly, guiding them into his office.  He shut the door.  "That's what I wanted to talk to you about.  Have a seat – both of you."

Harry didn't like the sound of this, but he took the chair in front of Ron's wildly cluttered desk and after a moment Draco perched uneasily on the window cill.  The blond wizard wasn't too happy at being in these offices, Harry could tell, but he supposed that wasn't unreasonable given his personal history.  Ron himself flopped out in his usual graceless manner in the chair behind the desk and folded his arms.

"I talked to Justin Finch-Fletchley last week," he said to Harry.  "We had some rather extended and roundabout conversations about his vigilante friends, and after a while he gave me a few names which I followed up.  I won't bore you with the details, because you can probably imagine how _that_ went."  He quirked an eyebrow at his friend, and Harry looked resigned.  "Still, it had some unexpected benefits, including putting the fear of God into one or two reasonably respectable families who had no idea what their little darlings were getting up to during their weekend trips to Hogsmeade.  More to the point, it put the fear of Snape into the said little darlings, as our revered Headmaster also had no idea what the kids were up to when they were supposed to be drinking Butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks and doing their homework."

Draco snorted softly, and the tiniest hint of a smile tugged at the corners of Ron's mouth.  "Anyway, another unexpected benefit landed in my lap this morning – figuratively speaking – in the form of the editor of _Wizard Monthly._   She claims that she has no idea who deposited certain goods in her possession, but she recognised at once that they probably belonged to Harry Potter, especially after the shocking coverage in the _Daily Prophet_ , and because she's a law-abiding citizen and her magazine has a reputation to uphold ... etcetera, etcetera.  Anyway, she brought a sack-load of stuff with her, so I need you to come and identify it."

Ron took Harry and Draco through to an interview room, where Dean Thomas was patiently guiding a middle-aged witch in lilac robes through making a formal statement.  The steno-quill was having to make frequent pauses as the woman interrupted herself to outline some minor point to Dean, and the dark Auror was looking more than a little exasperated.  He greeted Harry with a tiny grin and an expressive roll of his eyes, and gave Draco a cool look, before firmly directing the witch's attention back to her statement.

"Over here," Ron told Harry quietly, and guided him to a long table up against the wall.  "Can you positively identify these for me?"

Eight large, leather-bound books were laid on the table.  With a tiny sigh, Harry carefully opened them, one after another, and was relieved to see that no damage had come to them.  Sirius Black's neat, spidery writing crossed the broad sheets of parchment, detailing everything from his family tree to his years in Azkaban and the early years of the war, right up until the day before he died. 

"These are Sirius's journals ....  Yes, they're all here.  But what about the other things?  There were two of Remus's spellbooks taken as well, and I wouldn't want them to fall into the wrong hands."

In the background, the witch was twittering: " – never seen them before in my _life_ , but of course as a member of the journalistic fraternity, I'm used to anonymous sources – "

"These were sold to Madam Palimperset," Ron explained quietly, "and Dean's trying to find out who the sellers were, but I'm guessing the spellbooks were more interesting to the thieves and they hung onto them.  Given that we know most of the gang were teenagers, I dropped a few words to Snape this morning and he's going to institute a search of Hogwarts to see if they've been hidden in the school.  If they're there, he'll find them."

Harry could well believe it.  Snape was relentless in such matters.  "What about the other stuff?" he asked.

"No news so far," Ron replied, "but I'm guessing they'll try to get rid of it as fast as they can.  Now we have part of the goods, we have grounds for getting warrants to search the suspects' houses, so I've put word around in the second-hand community that certain items – such as the wand and broomstick – are likely to turn up shortly, if they haven't already.  I'm particularly keen to find out what happens to the magic carpet, since there've been rumblings on the black market about flying carpets lately.  But if it does turn up, you realise I'll have to confiscate it, don't you?" 

His tone was honestly regretful, and Harry flashed him a weak smile at this.  That carpet had been an accessory to a couple of their lucky escapes during the war.

"Can't be helped," he replied.  "I suppose I'm glad to have even half of the stuff back."

"Well, it's better than I expected," Ron told him optimistically.  He ushered the two of them back out of the room, diplomatically shielding both of them as much as he could from the witch's interested gaze, and led the way back to his office.

"Can I take the journals home now?" Harry asked.

"Not yet, I'm afraid.  They're evidence."

"You're not going to keep them in the general Evidence Room, are you?" Draco asked unexpectedly.

Ron raised a brow at him.  "No, I've thought of that," he replied cryptically.  "They'll be going to the secure vault at Gringotts."

Harry looked at the two of them, puzzled.  "What's that about?"

Ron grimaced.  "The Minister has started showing an increased interest in the work of the Aurors," he began.

"For that, read "The Minister thinks the Aurors are too damn autonomous and he wants a bigger say in how they're run"," Draco put in cynically.

"He says he's putting together a working party to look into how the Aurors' Department is organised," Ron continued, trying to mask his irritation.  "He did one of his whistle-stop tours the other day and insisted on poking his wand into all the dustier corners of the office.  He's particularly concerned about the stuff we keep in storage and wants to know how it's managed."

Harry stared.  The storage facilities were _huge_ , containing four or five centuries' worth of confiscated goods and evidence.  "So give him the keys and a lamp and let him get on with it.  While he's gone, we can elect another Minister to get the real work done!  Honestly ....  Why do we always end up with complete dickheads in that job?  Doesn't he know there was an overhaul of the Aurors after the war, complete with a two hundred page report from the Council of Magical Law?"

The redhead grinned.  "Yes, but that was under a previous administration, and don't you know they were utterly incompetent?"

"They all look the same to me," grumbled Harry.  "Mind you, at least no one's been in league with Voldemort, like old Fudge was.  I suppose that's something.  But when did all this happen?"

"Earlier in the week," Ron said.  "It was all over the front page of the _Prophet_ two days running."

"Oh.  I haven't been reading the papers lately." 

With good reason; but Ron made no comment on that.  "Anyway, I didn't like the level of interest shown in the storage facilities.  It's not the Minister I worry about but some of his so-called advisors, so I won't put anything like this in there … you know, just in case."

"Thanks."

"No problem.  I'll let you know if anything else turns up."  Ron walked with them through to the main office where the Floo point was.  "Oh, by the way, Harry – Charlie's home so everyone's having dinner at the Burrow tonight.  Do you want to come?"

Harry hesitated.  Truthfully, he didn't feel anything like up to dealing with the entire Weasley family right now, and especially not Ginny – or Hermione for that matter, as she was guaranteed to fuss over him after the pill incident.  Ron saw his expression and looked resigned.

"Didn't think so, but I thought I'd ask.  Well, he's going to be around for a couple of weeks so maybe we can fix something up later."

"That would be good," Harry said gratefully.

 

*

 

"How did you know about the storage facilities?" Harry asked, as he and Draco spread their purchases out over the kitchen table.

"It really _was_ all over the front page of the _Prophet_ ," the blond wizard replied absently.  "Weasley didn't say anything to the press, but a couple of the Minister's cronies made grandiose statements about the vast contents of the stores and how it was costing the Ministry money to keep it all.  Which is all well and good, but the tone of their remarks was a bit off – the papers are still on the coffee table if you want to read them.  I need to read up on these potions before we get started."

So Harry spent a couple of hours going through the week's news.  It didn't take long to discover why both Draco and Ron had shown concern – some of the remarks made by the Ministry officials bothered him too, especially suggestions that contractors could be brought in to survey the evidence store with a view to selling off some of the contents.  Considering that most of the material was evidence of Dark activities, the idea was hair-raising.

Typical Ministry lunacy in Harry's opinion, although the part of him that would always be at war with Voldemort made note of the officials' names for future reference.  No one needed to fight yet another Dark conspiracy in the Ministry.

Draco interrupted him just before lunch. 

"Are you bothered by the possible effects of the potion on your sex life?"  Judging by his distracted tone, the question was genuine.

"What sex life?" Harry sighed.

Draco looked at him over the top of the book.  "If you're trying to engage my sympathy, it's a wasted effort.  Let's get started …."

The rest of the day was spent preparing potions ingredients and assembling equipment.  Harry dug out his old school cauldron, and they unearthed two pestles and mortars from Remus Lupin's greenhouse at the bottom of the garden.  A couple of scouring charms and the equipment was as good as new.

Draco, who had narrowly beaten Hermione in the Potions NEWTs exam at school, was as exacting a taskmaster as Professor Snape had been, but Harry found the physical activity of chopping, skinning and pounding surprisingly soothing.  He was a little impressed by Draco's calm, instructional manner, and said so.

"You're too kind," was the blond wizard's response.  He was paying more attention to the careful sieving of powdered ginger into the cauldron.

"Had you considered applying for the Potions Master's job at Hogwarts?  They've been having real problems finding a permanent teacher for the post lately – "

"I hardly think the board of governors would want a former Death Eater to teach their children," Draco interrupted him sharply.  "Especially not Lucius Malfoy's son!"

"I think you and the wizarding world need to get over the Death Eater business," Harry told him, crushing dried Billywig stings thoughtfully.

"I'll get over it when you get over being the Boy Who Lived," was the acid retort.

Harry stared down at his half-filled mortar, cursing himself for saying something so stupid.  "I'm sorry."

Draco rolled his eyes.  "Stop apologising.  You have as much right to hold an opinion as I have to snap at you about it.  Have you got those stings ready?  Careful!  This is going to froth up a bit."

After that, the conversation stayed on firmly neutral lines until the early evening, when they put the cauldron on a low light to simmer for four hours and opened a can of soup for dinner.  A general lack of appetite, combined with the assorted smells of potion ingredients, made for a poor meal which was not helped at all by Hedwig's arrival with the _Evening Prophet._   Harry unfolded the newspaper and nearly suffocated on a piece of bread when he saw the headline:

 _BOY WHO LIVED SEEN WITH DEATH EATER MALFOY IN DIAGON ALLEY!_

"I rest my case," Draco commented dryly, when he saw it.

 

*

 

After that, perhaps it was just as well that the antidepressant potion was ready for drinking just before they went to bed.  Draco strained it through muslin into a large glass flagon and surveyed the clear, rosy-pink colour critically. 

"Looks right," he commented, and sniffed the unstoppered neck of the flagon.  "Smells right.  Oh well, only one way to find out if it works."  He found two shot glasses and poured a measure into each, handing one to Harry solemnly.  "Cauldrons up!"

"I didn't think you were going to drink it too," Harry observed, but he followed Draco's example and knocked it back.  "Oh!  Actually, that's not too bad.  Ginger-ale taste …."

"Better than most potions I've had," Draco agreed.  "You won't feel the effects of this immediately, but hopefully in a day or so you should feel less like throwing yourself off your broomstick every time something goes a bit wrong.  It's supposed to help you sleep as well, but that takes longer."

"What about you?" asked Harry.

Draco looked up, a little surprised at the question, and suddenly smiled ruefully.  "Me too."

It occurred to Harry that he couldn't remember ever seeing Draco smile naturally like that before, but he knew better than to mention it.  Instead he stoppered the flagon tightly while Draco wrote out a label, then he stashed it on the cold floor of the pantry.

"I think I'm for bed," he commented when he returned to the kitchen.  "Is it me, or has it been a very long day?"

 

*

 

Why that night should have been worse than normal was anyone's guess, but Harry suffered one nightmare after another until finally he found himself being shaken awake by Draco in the early hours of the morning.  In the dim glow of his wand, the blond wizard didn't look much better than Harry himself felt.

"My God, Harry, I thought you were going to scream the house down …."

"Sorry."  Harry slumped against the pillows, still trembling.  His pyjamas were soaked with sweat.  "I normally use a silencing charm, but I must have forgotten."

There was a tiny pause.  "You have nightmares like that often?"

He shrugged.  "On and off.  It goes in phases."

Draco sat on the end of the bed, looking a little shaken.  "I didn't think anyone could have dreams like mine, but obviously I was wrong."

"You too?"  Harry simply accepted this; he was in no state to enquire further, and wasn't sure he wanted to anyway.  "Some are worse than others.  And it's funny, but I dream more about my parents now than I ever did when I was a kid."

"I don't dream about my parents at all.  Thank God."  Draco hugged himself, shivering. 

"Here – get in, you're cold."  Harry pushed the covers aside on the other side of the bed.  Then he saw Draco's expression and almost chuckled.  "It's okay, I won't jump on you!  Even if I was in the mood, I don't think it'd be a good idea right now, do you?"

"Pity - I can't remember the last time I had a decent offer," Draco mused, "or even a half-decent offer."  But he climbed under the covers.

"I think I probably constitute a poor deal," Harry commented.  It was a cold night, and he burrowed into the blankets like a hibernating hedgehog.

He was just beginning to doze again when Draco unexpectedly asked "Why?"

"Oh ... aside from the crap moods and nightmares?  Not enough experience," Harry murmured.  Halfway to sleep was always a good time to get frank opinions out of him, as Ron had commented once during a stakeout.  "I've had a grand total of two sexual partners in my life, and one of them turned out to be a – " he paused to yawn, "a succubus.  Which wasn't the same."

Draco had been drifting off to sleep himself, but at this his eyes shot open again.  "Are you winding me up?" he demanded.

"Hm?" 

"Harry?"

But Harry was already asleep.

 

*

 

If someone had told Harry when he was a teenager that he would one day sleep two nights in a row in the same bed as Draco Malfoy, he would have advised them kindly to seek help from the Psychiatric Department of St. Mungo's Hospital.

Instead, he woke up the following morning with one main thought; that it was very, _very_ enjoyable to wake up feeling so warm and comfortable.  It took his rational mind a while to register that the source of this enjoyment was the second body in the bed pressed tightly up against his back.  And even then he didn't immediately make the connection.  Harry was a perfectly normal adult male and only human; he might have spent most of his life celibate but he'd had more than his fair share of fantasies involving scenarios not dissimilar to this.

Shortly after that, Harry woke up to the fact that his snuggling partner was Draco Malfoy – and that Draco probably wasn't aware of what he was doing.  It took him another five minutes to decide how to extricate himself without causing an uncomfortable scene. 

Somehow he managed to slide out from under a carelessly thrown arm ... then he spent the next quarter of an hour in the shower telling his ridiculously adolescent hormones to take a hike.  Starting the day with a cold shower during the first week of December was something he was _not_ very happy about.

Draco didn't even begin to stir until Harry was fully dressed and, feeling ridiculously spooked, he bolted out of the door before the other man could wake up enough to start asking questions.  By the time Draco appeared in the kitchen Harry was halfway through preparing the kind of breakfast he almost never ate, and probably wouldn't eat today either.  He eyed the blond wizard a little skittishly and mumbled a greeting.

Draco was far more direct.  "Is there a reason why you're up at the crack of dawn on a Sunday, burning sausages?"

"Oh, I – "

"More to the point, was there a reason why you felt you had to sneak out of bed like a criminal this morning?"

Caught on the hop, Harry was stuck for an answer.  His mouth opened and closed silently for a moment, and Draco stared at him bitterly.  The glare didn't quite mask the hurt behind it.

"Bloody hell, Potter!  In case you've forgotten, last night was _your_ idea, so what exactly is your problem?"

"I wasn't sure – I mean, I didn't – "  Harry spluttered to a halt and took a deep breath, trying to pull himself together.  "Look, I didn't _have_ a problem, but I wasn't sure if you would."

"If I have a problem, you'll know about it!"  Draco was not appeased.  "I could have walked away, but I didn't.  I got the distinct impression that you wanted me there last night!"

"I did, but – "

Harry was interrupted by Hedwig suddenly swooping into the kitchen and dropping a letter on Draco's head.  He caught it reflexively but his look of surprise was quickly replaced by dismay, for the envelope was a bright, distinctive red.

"Oh _crap_ ," Harry exclaimed.  "It's a Howler!"  He grabbed a knife from the worktop and tossed it to the other man.  "Quick, open it before it explodes!"

Swearing, Draco slit the thing open and immediately dropped both Howler and knife in his haste to plug his ears with his fingers.  The force of the opening shriek rattled every cupboard in the kitchen, shook Harry's spatula to the floor and made the wooden chairs and table dance on their legs.

 _"DRACO MALFOY!  YOU MISERABLE, BLOODSUCKING DISGRACE TO WIZARDKIND, HOW DARE YOU SHOW YOUR FACE IN FRONT OF RESPECTABLE MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY?  AND HOW DARE YOU INFLICT YOURSELF ON HARRY POTTER AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF HIS GOOD NATURE?  YOU MAY HAVE WHEEDLED YOUR WAY AROUND HIM, BUT YOU DON'T FOOL THE REST OF US!  YOU FILTHY, GUTTER-DWELLING SCUM, AZKABAN IS TOO GOOD FOR VULTURES LIKE YOU!  IF YOU HAD ANY DECENCY LEFT YOU'D CUT YOUR OWN THROAT AND SAVE EVERYONE ELSE THE MISERY OF LOOKING AT YOU.  I'M WARNING YOU, MALFOY, I'M ONTO YOU AND IF YOU DON'T LEAVE HARRY ALONE, I'LL MAKE YOU REGRET THAT YOU WERE EVER BORN!"_

There was an ear-throbbing pause and the envelope burst into flames, leaving the two men staring, shell-shocked, at the patch of soot it left on the floor.  After a moment Draco swallowed hard and took his fingers out of his ears.

"Who the hell was that?" he managed.

Harry was still staring at the smudged stone flags.  "Ginny Weasley," he said, and suddenly he turned and extinguished the flame on the hob with a wave of his wand.  When he turned back, his expression was grim.  "Excuse me for a minute, will you?"

He disappeared up the passage to the living room and went inside, shutting the door behind him firmly.  When he re-emerged twenty minutes later Draco was sitting at the kitchen table, very pale, and sipping a cup of tea.

"Did you make a full pot?" Harry asked, and at Draco's nod he poured himself a cup and took the seat opposite the blond wizard.  "Are you alright?"

"Yes, of course," Draco said brusquely, but he was clearly still a little shaken.  "Hell hath no fury like a Weasley scorned, apparently."  He gave Harry a tight little smile.  "At least, I'm assuming that's what was behind it?"

"Something like that," Harry admitted.  "Well, I don't know about the 'scorned' part.  I haven't succeeded yet in convincing her _or_ her mother that we wouldn't make a perfect couple, so I don't think she considers herself scorned."

"Ah!  Now it all becomes clear – why you didn't want to accept Weasley's invitation yesterday.  Does she know you're not interested in women?"

"She does now." 

Draco looked at him in sudden alarm.  "What have you done?"

Harry shrugged, sipping his tea.  Moments later there was the sound of footsteps in the passage and Ron suddenly appeared in the doorway, looking untidy and frazzled.  He made a beeline for the teapot. 

"Is there any tea?"

"There might be a cup left."

"Thanks."  The redhead found a mug and filled it.  Then he raided the contents of Harry's abandoned frying pan as well.  He took a seat at the kitchen table, munching on a cold sausage, and looked at the two of them.

"Help yourself," Harry invited dryly.

"Thanks, I have."  Ron finished the sausage and licked his fingers.  "There's total uproar at home.  My wife, my mother and my sisters-in-law are furious.  Ginny's locked herself in her room and we think she's smashing things up in there.  Charlie and Fred are laughing their heads off, and Bill wants to know if he can set you up with a friend of his in Egypt.  Happy Sunday morning, Harry."

Harry had the grace to look a little abashed.  "Sorry I upset your mum."

Ron rolled his eyes.  "I'm sure she'll get over it … in a century or two."  A grin dawned on his freckled face.  "I don't think she ever dreamed her precious Harry would storm into her house and yell at Ginny to grow up and realise he's gay."

Draco looked at Harry.  "You didn't?"

"He did."  Ron looked calculatingly over his shoulder at the frying pan.  "If you're not going to eat the rest of that grub, I will.  I haven't a hope in hell of getting breakfast at Mum's house this morning."  He wrinkled his nose.  "By the way, what's the weird smell in here?"

"That would be the potion we spent most of yesterday afternoon brewing," Draco replied.

"It doesn't taste nearly as bad as it smells," Harry added, getting up.  "If you're going to eat that stuff, at least let me hot it up."

"A potion?"  Ron looked from one to the other of them.  "What kind of potion?"

"Antidepressant."  Harry gave the hob a poke with his wand and slid the frying pan over the light.

"Really?"  Ron snorted.  "Judging by the frisky way you acted this morning, I'd say it works!  What made you come charging in like that anyway?  What did Ginny do?"

"She sent Draco a Howler telling him to cut his throat," Harry told him blandly.

The change in Ron's expression was so fast it was almost funny.  "You're joking."

"Nope."

"'Scuse me – "  And suddenly Ron was gone, as quickly as he arrived.

Harry sighed and took the frying pan off the hob once more.  "I think Ginny's going to get yelled at again," he commented.

"You shouldn't have told him that," Draco said sharply.  "The last thing I need is people making a big deal of – "

"Draco, shut up a minute!  And listen to me, okay?"  Harry folded his arms and glared at the blond man.  "Why, exactly, should Ginny get away with telling you or anyone else to top themselves?  How can it right for her to say things like that to you?  If you were in anything like the state I've been in most of this week, you might actually have gone and done it!"

"And I'm sure people would be really sorry if that happened!"

"I would," Harry told him honestly.  "I would have regretted it even before you moved in here with me, and I don't think I would have been the only one, despite appearances.  Whatever else you might have done with your life, Draco, you were a schoolmate of mine, and I watched too many of them die during the war.  Even Ron wouldn't wish you dead, or didn't you get the significance of his reaction just now?"

Draco seemed to be struggling with some strong emotion; it might have been anger, or something else.  "I _was_ a Death Eater – "

"And you renounced it, were tried and were acquitted," Harry interrupted.  "You gave evidence against other Death Eaters and took no part in the war.  You did the _right thing_ , remember?  I was listening the other night!  And however tactlessly I might have put it yesterday, I really do think you need to get over the Death Eater business and move on.  Because until you forgive yourself and put it behind you, no one else will."

He heaved a sigh and added apologetically, "And it's a bit early to be making speeches and moralising.  I'm sorry."

"The same goes for you, you know," Draco told him, getting a grip on himself.  "You need to put things behind you and move on as well."

Harry looked away, prodding moodily at the congealing fried breakfast in the pan.  "I know.  I'm trying to."

"Are you?"  Draco gave him a thoughtful look.  "Okay … why _did_ you rush out of bed this morning?"

Harry smiled reluctantly.  He had to admire the other man's persistence.  "Because I wasn't sure you'd be as happy to see me when you were awake as you were when you were asleep!"

Draco smothered a grin.  "Not because of some lingering obsession with Carrot-Top?"

"I trained myself not to fantasise about Ron a long time ago," Harry assured him good-naturedly.  "Indulging unrealistic ideas about him seemed like the short route to insanity."

"Glad to hear it.  I don't think there's room for three of us in that bed."

Harry smiled, but said, "Don't take this the wrong way, but ... I meant what I said last night.  I really _don't_ think it would be a good idea to go any further yet.  I'm a bit flaky right now, and you – "

"I'm also quite flaky, I just hide it better," Draco interrupted.  "Don't be fooled – I've been where you were the day before yesterday.  The only difference was that my attempt was deliberate and the people who stopped me were a lot less understanding."  He smiled faintly at Harry's expression, and pushed the sleeves of his sweatshirt up.  Thin scars from his wrists to the crook of his elbows stood out, silvery white, against his pale skin.  "Weasley's sister doesn't know the half of it," he commented.  "There was a valid reason I was willing to take that potion last night, you know."

Harry swallowed.  "I hadn't thought of that.  When ...?"

The other man shrugged.  "While I was still living in Ministry safe houses.  Even though no one was supposed to know where I was, there were still a couple of attempted hits.  An Auror was killed the first time, and as you can imagine that made me really popular with her colleagues.  Admittedly that was my lowest point, but I've been close to it a couple of times since."  With a little difficulty, he added, "I think this is the most friendly contact I've had with people since my trial.  I've tried to keep my distance – "

"That's got to stop," Harry told him, quietly but firmly.  "I've tried staying away from people too, but it doesn't work.  For better or worse you have to start trying to live a normal life, or there will always be a big hue and cry when you're seen.  You were _acquitted_.  You've got to stop living like a guilty man."

"Easier said than done.  There are people out there who quite seriously want me dead."

"So?  According to Ron, I'm _always_ number one on the list of most attractive assassination targets, but I'm damned if I'm going to hide in the house behind barred windows."

They looked at each other for a moment; then a small smile crept across Draco's face. 

"I think that argument ended in a draw," he said, and Harry grinned.

"I think it did too."  He pushed the frying pan to the back of the hob.  "I've had far too much excitement this morning – I'm knackered already.  How do you feel about heading back to bed for a couple of hours' extra sleep?"

Draco nodded.  "Sounds reasonable to me.  It _is_ Sunday."  Then a thought occurred to him.  "And you can tell me about the succubus."

Harry's eyes widened.  "Not on your life!"

 

*

 

 _This is definitely becoming a habit_ , was Harry's first waking thought nearly a fortnight later.  Almost every morning for the last ten days he'd woken to find Draco tucked up against his back.  Not that he was complaining; but they always started out in separate rooms, as though that extra bit of distance would prevent them going any further than sleeping together.

Neither of them was ready for the next step yet.  All the same, it was very nice to wake up warmed by someone else's body heat and Harry allowed himself to enjoy it for ten minutes or so, before the alarm went off and he had to drag himself out of bed to the shower.

"I hate your alarm clock," Draco mumbled from the depths of the blankets, as Harry cautiously tested the room temperature with a foot.

Harry smiled.  "Well it's you who doesn't like dealing with the 'common element' in Diagon Alley later in the day.  If you want to beat the rush, you have to get up early."

There was a moan.  "Did I say I was going to Diagon Alley today?"

"Yes.  Christmas shopping, remember?  I have a million Weasleys to buy presents for."

"We should have foreseen this when Voldemort fell."  Draco slowly emerged from the covers, looking rumpled and grumpy.  "A Weasley world invasion.  The new redheaded master race …."

"'The future's bright.  The future's orange'," chuckled Harry.

"Eh?"

"Sorry.  Old Muggle advertisement." 

"If you say so."  Draco yawned.  "It'll be a million and one Weasleys next year, your know.  Even your bank account's going to start creaking at this rate."

"A million and two.  Fred and Angelina are expecting another one shortly."  Harry grinned at Draco's expression.  "Well … it's not going to get any warmer in here."  He resolutely threw back the covers and hopped out of bed.  "Yow!  At this rate we might actually have a white Christmas …."  He plunged into the bathroom, leaving Draco to get up at his own pace.

Diagon Alley was already heaving with shoppers by the time they arrived, despite the early hour, and Harry could sense Draco bracing himself as they braved the hoards.  It was true that once again they got some stares, not a few of which were unfriendly; but the bulk of the wizarding public had more important things on their minds that day – Christmas presents.  The bigger concern for Harry and Draco was navigating the poky shops around people burdened down with enormous parcels and bulging bags.

"I'm tempted to get this for Ron - he'd throw a fit!" Harry commented to Draco in Flourish and Blotts, and showed him a book from the Biography section – _My Memory and Me_ by Gilderoy Lockhart.  Lockhart had re-emerged after the war, a little more sensible than he had been when Harry was twelve, but not much.  "Bit of an expensive joke though."  The book was nearly two Galleons, so he put it back on the shelf.  "Are you ready to go?  Let's get some lunch somewhere …."

"If we can find room," Draco replied.  "It's bedlam - doesn't anyone work on a weekday anymore?"

They edged their way outside and stood on the steps for a moment, glad to breathe fresh air.  Most of the shops were overdoing the warming charms, and too many customers made it unbearably stuffy.  Harry waited for a gap in the throng and stepped out into the street.

 _"HARRY POTTER!"_

He looked up, astonished at the stentorian cry.  Heads were turning all around him, but the street was so crowded that he couldn't see –

"Harry, _move!_ "  That was Draco, and suddenly the blond wizard was barrelling into him, sending him staggering to the other side of the street.

 _BANG!_

Screams, and the crowd scattered, diving willy-nilly into whatever shop doorways were available. Harry could suddenly see clear up the Alley to where a black-robed figure was standing just in front of Hickory's Fine Old Soap Emporium.  He drew his wand without thinking, but there was a small flash and a second _bang_ deafening in the close confines of the street –

Draco let out a gasp and fell to his knees on the freezing cobbles.  Harry reacted with reflexes honed from the war; one flick of his wand and long white filaments shot towards the attacker but the man? - woman? – Apparated away just in time.  The filaments tangled themselves around the long, candy-striped pole outside a barber's shop.

Harry promptly forgot about the attacker, dropping to his knees beside Draco.  "Draco!  Are you okay?  Are you hurt?"

"My arm – " Draco was gritting his teeth, his hand clamped around his upper arm.

"Let me see – "

"Don't think it was a spell."  He sounded surprised and a little bewildered.

Harry didn't waste time wondering at that.  He pushed Draco's cloak aside and tugged the sleeve of his dark blue robe up; underneath he was wearing a long-sleeved grey shirt that was soaked in blood.  There was a small hole in the material.  Harry lost no time in hooking his fingers into it and ripping the sleeve apart.  A matching hole was pouring blood from Draco's biceps, and he clamped his left hand just above it to try and stem the flow.

There was a series of sudden popping noises, and Harry felt a presence at his back.

"What the hell happened?"  Ron assessed the situation with one look, scattered his people to deal with any lingering threat, and quickly crouched beside Harry, taking hold of Draco's arm with both hands.  "What did this?  Find something to bind it, Harry – "

"It sounded like a gun," Harry told him.  He was already busily ripping the lining out of his cloak.  "Is there an exit wound?"

Ron examined Draco's arm with his fingertips.  "I don't think so."

"Then the bullet's still in there.  Can you Summon it out?"

"Okay, but get ready – as soon as it's out, it'll really start bleeding."

A crowd was slowly gathering again despite the efforts of the other Aurors to persuade people to keep back, but Ron and Harry ignored it.  Ron released Draco's arm and pulled out his wand, pointing it at the wound.  _"Accio!"_   The bullet shot out in a spurt of blood and Harry grabbed Draco's arm, applying pressure again.  Ron tore the cloak-lining into strips.

"Not exactly the best material for a bandage," he muttered.

"Well, _excuse_ me!  I'll remember to wear nothing but cotton in future," Harry retorted.

"Just rip up your undies next time!"

"Rip up your own longjohns, you pervert, I'm not stripping in this weather …."

They grinned at each other, for it was just like old times during the war, when they'd bickered over sacrificing an item of clothing to patch each other up.  A shadow fell over the them as they worked; Dean Thomas.

"Can't find any evidence of the assailant," he reported to Ron, "but I found this outside Hickory's."  He held out a revolver, suspended from his wand by the trigger guard.

Harry glanced at it – then did a double-take.  "Ron, is that - ?!"

Ron looked at it and from the look on his face he was holding back a curse with an effort.  "Wrap it up and take it back to headquarters," he told Dean grimly.  "And don't let it out of your sight."

"What was that?" Draco asked.  He sounded a bit muzzy; his skin was translucent from the blood loss and his eyes glazed with shock.

"Never mind," Ron told him.  "We need to get you to St. Mungo's before you take an infection in this wound.  Harry?"

Harry finished tying the makeshift bandage.  "Okay …"

They stood up, helping Draco to his feet.  He swayed slightly but managed to stand unaided.  Harry was suddenly conscious of the muttering going on among the rubbernecking witches and wizards in the street, and someone nearby actually said "Pity they missed" in a loud voice.

"Thanks a lot!" he snapped sharply, glaring around impartially.  Most people wouldn't meet his eyes.  "In case you hadn't noticed, that bullet was intended for _me_.  Or maybe that's what you meant?"

There was no reply, and a number of people quickly slunk away.  When he turned back, Ron was looking at him gravely but all he said was "Let's go, shall we?"

 


	4. Chapter 4

Harry hated St. Mungo's Hospital. 

Not the purpose of it, of course, for it fulfilled an important role; but he hated the antiseptic smell, the self-important bustle of the nurses and doctors, the old-fashioned wards and the hushed sense that someone was about to die any minute of something lingering and hideous.  He had never liked Muggle hospitals on the few occasions he'd visited them, but compared to them the wizard hospital was like something out of the 1930s.

He'd spent time here once or twice during the war.  Perhaps that was what disturbed him the most about it, because nearly all of his memories of this place involved scores of casualties crammed in on too many beds with not enough medics to treat them.  Sirius had died in this place while a stressed and inexperienced mediwizard had tried frantically to halt the curse that had spread spores of a deadly fungus throughout his internal organs.  He had died in his godson's arms, and two days later Harry had gone through the same process with Remus Lupin; only not here, but on the other side of the building, in the isolation unit reserved for werewolves and other dangerous "halflings".

Harry wasn't alone in his unease.  Ron was clenching his jaw so tightly that his teeth were grinding almost audibly, and Draco was restless and twitchy on his gurney.  The mediwizard examining the wound was tutting in a way that was going to get him slapped by one of them if he didn't stop soon.

But at length he summoned a nurse to swab the wound with a dark green, smoking potion and administer a tonic that would correct the blood loss.  Then the wound was dressed, the arm put in a sling and Draco told to go home and rest.

Draco eyed the nurse with the greatest suspicion.  Discomfort was making him revert to type.  "Are you intending to heal this at all?" he asked pointedly. 

"No, Sir," she told him briskly.  "That's a Muggle-type wound – too dangerous to heal with magic.  It'll have to heal on its own."

And she stalked off before he could think of a suitable retort.

"Aren't you glad none of us wanted to bring you here after your little 'accident'?" he demanded of Harry bitterly, as he swung his legs off the gurney and stood up.  The comment was unusually barbed considering the direction their relationship was heading in lately.

Harry shot Ron a warning glare when the redhead would have snapped back him.  "Very glad," he replied blandly, and steadied Draco when he swayed.  "Besides, you didn't _want_ to stay here any longer, did you?  You'll be better off at home."

Draco muttered in a very surly tone about not being better anywhere, that 'better' was relative anyway, and 'home' a state of mind that he hadn't possessed for many years.  He continued grumbling in this vein all the way to the hospital's Floo point, and was generally rude and ungracious with all attempts to help him.

"What did you expect?" Harry asked an irritated Ron when they were back at Phoenix Lodge.  Draco was installed on the living room sofa while Harry made tea in the kitchen.  "He's in pain.  He took a bullet for me today and all the thanks he got was someone saying the gunman botched the job.  And he's still Draco Malfoy, in case you'd forgotten, so he's not exactly a sweet personality to start with."

Ron gave him a thoughtful look.  "You've got more patience with him than I have."

"Well he did save my life today," Harry pointed out.  "Considering that's the second time in less than a month, I owe him a little slack to say the least."

"You're sure you were the target, then?"

"He yelled my name before he fired.  I think that's pretty conclusive, don't you?"

Ron looked grim.  "The Death Eaters haven't taken a serious pop at you in a long time.  Why now, I wonder?"

"Probably something to do with me and Malfoy," Harry suggested.  He didn't look very happy either.  "Although why the Death Eaters should care if that's the case, I can't imagine – if it _was_ Death Eaters.  What bothers me more is the weapon involved."

"It might not be the same gun," Ron said, but without much confidence.

"If that was a Death Eater, they're not very likely to have gone to a Muggle shop to get a revolver – for one thing, I doubt they'd know what to ask for."

"There are dealers in Knockturn Alley who could provide one, at a price."

"Maybe, but I know that gun pretty well," Harry replied, and he suppressed a shudder; he'd hoped never to set eyes on that weapon again.  "I thought it was buried in the evidence store?"

"It _was_."  Ron sounded angry, although not with Harry.  "I thought I'd managed to lose it pretty well down there too.  Damn!  When I find out how this happened …."  He didn't finish the sentence; he didn't have to.

"Do you think this has anything to do with the Minister's sudden attack of nosiness?"

"If it is, it's going to cause one hell of a stink.  Oh, hell!  I'd better go and sort it out."  Ron sighed and pulled his cloak on.

"Let me know what happens," Harry asked, concerned at his friend's weary expression.  "And thanks for what you did today."

Ron gave him a crooked grin.  "Not at all - what are friends for?  Besides, all this excitement you're providing gives me job security."

He disappeared into the living room.  Harry heard voices briefly, then silence.  When he went into the living room himself, Draco was alone on the sofa, looking pale and moody.

"Tea," Harry told him, setting it down on a small table at the other man's elbow.  He sat down next to him.  "Sure you don't want something to eat?"

Draco glared.  "I'm fine, really.  Stop fussing!"

"All right."  Harry hid a smile in his own mug.  "What did Ron say to you before he left?"

Draco looked grumpier than ever.  "Weasley's an ass.  I didn't do it for him!"

"I'm glad to hear it."  Harry put his mug down and before Draco could guess what he was doing he leaned in and gave him a quick peck on the cheek.  "Thank you."

The blond wizard mumbled irritably on principle, but he was clearly mollified.  He relaxed a little, and instead of looking exhausted and miserable, he just looked exhausted.  "That gun …."

Harry sighed.  "It may have been the one I shot Voldemort with.  Which begs the question of how our attacker got hold of it."

"There are plenty of people out there who still sympathise with some of Voldemort's aims," Draco told him tiredly.  "More, in some ways, than there were a few years ago, when the war was still fresh in everyone's minds.  Things like that – ideas, passions, prejudices - don't go away.  The horror just loses some of its bite.  Besides, Voldemort's death leaves a gap that's begging to be filled, and there's always room for a strong dissenting voice.  People grow tired of thanking heroes and want something new."

"None of us ever wanted thanks," Harry told him.  "Mostly we just wanted peace and security."

Draco smiled faintly.  "Peace and security are boring, Harry.  People want excitement – why else do you think Weasley's brother can make a living selling sweets that turn people into giant canaries?"

Harry smiled, but it quickly faded.  "Do you think there are Death Eaters at the Ministry again?"

"I don't believe there are any real Death Eaters left," Draco replied.  "Not if you mean men who took the Dark Mark during Voldemort's campaign.  That man who shot me – I think he was at best a wannabe, not the real thing.  Someone who knows nothing of true service to the Dark Lord and all that it entailed.  He'll rant meaninglessly about pureblood supremacy and how wizarding kind has been betrayed, but I'll bet he kept his head well below the parapet during the war."

"People like that can still be dangerous," Harry remarked, "if only for the misinformation they spread.  Someone like that in the Ministry - "

" – Could be a definite problem.  He won't be the only one, unfortunately.  Someone once said that society gets the leaders it deserves, and I think that's been borne out by the succession of idiots who've paraded in and out of office at the Ministry ever since the war ended."

Harry drank his tea, feeling mildly depressed by the idea, but unable to think of a refuting argument.  Finally he stirred himself.  "I think I'll wrap some presents …."

Draco looked at him, not fooled in the slightest by the attempt at diversion.  "Harry, you do realise none of this is your fault, don't you?"

Harry shrugged.  "I know, but it seems like this kind of thing happens a lot around me, and other people get caught in the crossfire."

The blond man snorted.  "So today someone decided to have a try at you.  Another day, they'll be taking a pop at _me_.  Stop taking the burdens of the world on your shoulders.  Trust me – if they didn't have you to take their frustrations out on, they'd just find somebody else."

"I suppose so."  Harry gave him a wry smile.  "I'll get the wrapping paper.  Fancy giving me a hand?"

Draco raised a brow at him.  "Considering that I only have one hand right now, I think I'll deny myself the honour."

 

*

 

The _Daily Prophet_ managed a front page spread about the attack the next day, emphasising Harry's close escape and the swift action of the Aurors.  What they didn't mention, perhaps predictably, was Draco's involvement.  Harry spent an enjoyable morning drafting a suitably scathing letter to the editor, which Draco later persuaded him – with difficulty – not to send.

"There's no point," he said, when Harry would have argued with him.  "They won't print it.  All you'll achieve is the editorial staff taking against you, and the next time you appear on the front page they'll be criticising _you_ , not bewailing the lawlessness of modern society.  You don't need the press against you."

Along with the morning newspaper, Hedwig brought two letters.  One was a note from Ron confirming that the gun had, indeed, been the revolver Harry used to kill Voldemort.  Of the man wielding it there was no trace, and so far Ron didn't have any leads on how he'd got hold of the gun.  _Brace yourself for the reaction when I report this officially,_ was Ron's dispirited closing comment. _Obviously the first people to have the finger pointed at them will be the Aurors themselves, which means an internal inquiry.  I've already got people breathing down my neck about it.  The Minister wants 'action'._

The other envelope contained a very nicely penned letter from Hermione inviting Harry to dinner on Christmas Day.  _We're spending Christmas at home this year,_ she wrote, _as Molly and Ginny will be spending the holiday with Charlie and his family in Romania.  Fred's going to his in-laws with Angelina and the children, but Bill will be with us and we were hoping to get together a small party of friends.  Do say you'll come._

At the bottom of the note, in Ron's scrawling handwriting, was a postscript:

 _And bring his nibs with you, of course._

 

*

 

Christmas morning dawned and Draco found himself dragged out a warm bed once again, this time for an activity that seemed utterly extraordinary to him; supervising Christmas meals at the Neverland shelter for those children who wouldn't be getting any dinner at home.

He wondered what his illustrious ancestors would think if they could see him dishing up turkey and Christmas pudding to Muggle teenagers, but decided that if they hadn't worked it out by the time he was stringing paper chains and tinsel around the place the previous week, then their opinion probably wasn't worth bothering with.

He found it even more extraordinary that Karen and Sally, the two women in charge of the centre, had bought him a Christmas present.  It was just a box of Muggle chocolates, but the fact that they had bothered at all bemused and gratified him in equal amounts.  The label embarrassed him a little, for it thanked him "for taking care of our other lost boy".  He wondered where they had come by that idea (naively, he thought they were ignorant of the nature of his relationship with Harry) and, in a brief flashback to the long-gone Draco Malfoy, considered how best to disabuse them of the notion.

Then he was hurrying to assist Harry in breaking up a food-fight and the thought was gone.

Later that day, he and Harry demolished the box of chocolates while listening to the Christmas broadcasts on WWN, then it was time to get ready for dinner at Ron and Hermione's house.

This was a tricky point.  Draco had not wanted to go.  He had seen Hermione's invitation and felt an absolute conviction that no gathering of the Gryffindor Trio's intimate friends would want to spend even a small part of Christmas Day with him.  But when he tried to explain this to Harry, the statement just wouldn't come out of his mouth the way he intended, and worse, he found himself feeling unaccountably guilty at Harry's disappointed expression.

So during the late afternoon of Christmas Day he found himself putting on his best jeans and sweater and pulling over the top a rather nice winter weight blue robe that was Harry's Christmas present to him.  It made him glad that he'd managed to find a decent, if modestly priced, gift for the dark-haired wizard in return – a copy of _Flitte's History of Quidditch_ , a much grander and more expansive volume than the more recent _Quidditch Through The Ages_.  The book was second-hand, but that was all right because it had been out of print for nearly fifty years anyway.  Draco counted it as something of a coup to have found a copy in good condition.  Harry had been delighted with it.

What to get the Weasleys had been more of a problem.  In no way did he feel that he was on gift-giving terms with them.  On the other hand, social graces had been hammered into Draco from an early age, and to turn up to dinner on Christmas Day without _something_ for his hosts was a serious breach of manners.  In the end he selected a bottle of wine for Ron and a box of hand-made chocolates from Honeydukes' "Prestige" range for Hermione, and hoped these would be acceptable.

They Apparated to the couple's house, Draco feeling more and more nervous as time passed.  Harry seemed to sense this, for he paused on the doorstep and gave him a quick smile.

"Stop fretting!  It'll be fine."

"And if it isn't?" muttered Draco.

Harry shrugged.  "Then we leave."  He saw the other man's expression.  "I'm serious!  I don't take any crap from people, even if they are my friends.  Besides, if you think Hermione _or_ Ron will tolerate people being rude to guests, then you obviously don't know them."

He rang the bell.

 

*

 

It wasn't as bad as Draco had feared.  Certainly there was a startled hush when he walked in with Harry, but to do them credit the group managed to rally before it became embarrassing.  The worst moment had, astonishingly, been quelled by Ron himself.  Seamus Finnigan had hissed rather audibly _"That's Draco Malfoy!  Why the hell's he here?"_

Ron's response was very bland.  "Probably because I invited him."

Besides Seamus and his fiancée Nuala, there was Dean Thomas and his wife Rosie, Ron's older brother Bill, a talkative man who turned out to be Dennis Creevey (he had followed Harry as Gryffindor Quidditch Captain and now played professionally), and Neville Longbottom. 

Several years of staying firmly out of sight led Draco to seek a quiet spot next to the Christmas tree, where he could admire the twinkling ornaments while Harry was feted by all his friends.  So it came as a distinct surprise when Neville of all people made a point of approaching him and asking how he was.

The years had been very kind indeed to the clumsy Gryffindor boy.  He still had a dishevelled look about him and he wasn't much better dressed than Draco himself was; but then the Longbottoms, while an old and respected wizard family, had never been wealthy.  He still looked rather absent-minded, but the overall impression was that of a slightly eccentric professor, which wasn't unpleasant.

Having spent much of his time at school tormenting Neville, Draco was put a little off balance by the friendly approach.  He managed a non-committal response and politely asked after the other man's career.

"Oh, I'm teaching Herbology at Hogwarts of course!" was the cheerful response, as though his taking over from Professor Sprout had never been in any doubt. 

And perhaps it hadn't.  Draco didn't know; he had never cared enough about Neville at school to find out if he had any subjects in which he excelled.  In fact, the most he could recall was a series of melted cauldrons, accompanied by the furious cawing of Professor Snape.

"That's good," he managed, trying to think of something to say.  "How do you get on with the headmaster?"

"Diabolically," was the frank response.  "He still scares the shit out of me.  But I spend most of my time in the greenhouses anyway, and if he comes looking for me any time, I make sure I've got the Venomous Tentacula between us ....  Are you keeping busy?"

"I manage," Draco replied, thinking of the shelter's games room mural and turkey dinners.

Neville nodded but didn't pursue this.  He seemed to be reassuringly un-nosy.  "Harry looks well," he commented.  "Better than the last time I saw him, anyway.  He was looking a bit dragged down then – had a bad few months, I hear.  Bad thing, the house being broken into like that."

"Not a high point in either of our lives," Draco agreed.

"Of course, you're lodging with him, aren't you.  Well, I hope you're getting enough to eat – Hermione's always fussing that Harry has no food in the house!"

Draco suppressed a twinge of annoyance at Hermione for blabbing about Harry's affairs to other people.

"I send him boxes of vegetables now and again, but perhaps he doesn't eat them."

Knowing Harry, he probably gave them to the Neverland shelter to feed the kids.  Draco hoped that Neville didn't use any unusual magical fertilisers that could cause unfortunate side-effects.  The last thing they needed was for one of those hyperactive Muggle teenagers to grow asses' ears or start levitating.

To his relief Hermione suddenly appeared, flushed from doing battle with her oven, and announced that dinner was ready.

Given that there were so many men and so few women, the large circular table was definitely unbalanced.  Draco found himself sandwiched between Neville and Bill Weasley, although fortunately Ron's brother seemed affable enough.

"I think it's goose," he commented, as they sat down, "or geese, more likely, considering the number of us."

It took Draco a moment to realise that he was talking about the dinner.  "Oh!  Good, I don't think I could face more turkey."

"Had one dinner already?" joked Neville.  He dropped his napkin, bent to pick it up and knocked his place mat and fork onto the floor as well, grinning good-naturedly when everyone laughed.  Rosie Thomas, who was sitting on the other side of him, gave him a friendly poke with her elbow and used her wand to whisk everything back into place.

"No, just a morning from hell helping Harry serve dinners at the shelter," Draco replied absently when the noise had died down a bit.  It wasn't until he saw Bill's face that he realised he shouldn't really have said that.  Supposedly only Hermione knew about Harry's charitable activities.  He hastily changed the subject.  "Er – are you still with Gringotts?"

"'Fraid so."

Draco racked his brains trying to remember if there was anything interesting in the financial section of the _Daily Prophet_ that he could follow his opening gambit with.  "Busy time of year," he managed lamely.

Fortunately it was enough. 

"Not half!" Bill said cheerfully, and he launched into a series of stories about trader dealing on the Wizard Stock Exchange that lasted all through the starter (French Onion Soup) and made Draco grateful he'd inherited some of his father's business acumen.  Funny; he'd always thought Bill was nothing more than a curse-breaker, but evidently his involvement these days went much farther than that.  The Weasleys were clearly going up in the world.

Maybe the redheaded master race wasn't such an unlikely idea after all.

"So what was that about a shelter?" Bill said, suddenly changing the subject.

"What?"  Oh damn.  Draco told himself to pay more attention to his dinner companions and less to his plate of nicely glazed goose and vegetables.  Hermione was quite a cook, contrary to Harry's stories. 

"You said something about serving dinners at a shelter."  There was a definite gleam in Bill's eye as he said this, and Draco was conscious of Neville listening intently.

"Oh … I don't think I should say anything about that."

"No, go on.  I love a good story about the Boy Wonder."

"I'd have thought you'd have seen enough of those lately," he retorted dryly.

"Death Eaters," Bill grimaced.  Then he realised what he'd said and flushed.  "Sorry …."

Draco shrugged, a little surprised that Bill had even apologised.  "Doesn't matter.  I gave up being a Death Eater before the war fully got under way."

The conversation on the other side of the table continued to flow, but began to lose a little of its smoothness as the others couldn't help listening in.  Draco wondered if it was possible to turn the subject around before it caused a social disaster.

"I haven't noticed Snape getting much flak from the _Prophet_ these days," he said to Neville.  "How does he manage that?"

Neville, amazingly, took the hint.  Perhaps managing large groups of teenagers had sharpened his wits.  "I think they're afraid of him," he replied cheerfully.  He made an expansive gesture that nearly knocked over the gravy boat.  " _Witch Weekly_ tried to do an article about him a couple of years ago – do you remember that, Dennis? – and it consisted almost entirely of yes and no answers.  He completely terrorised the reporter.  And when she asked him for his favourite recipe, he made her copy down the mixture for some hideously complicated potion to cure scrofulous skin lesions."

Seamus's fiancée looked a little green at this.

"Dennis's brother Colin was the staff photographer at the time," Neville continued.  "He said Snape insisted on being photographed in the dungeons, and with the lighting the way it is down there the photos never did develop properly.  Which is probably what Snape intended."

"He doesn't change a bit, does he?" Bill commented, grinning.

"Is he still teaching Potions, or has he finally loosened his grip on the subject now that he's headmaster?" asked Rosie.

"He stopped teaching a few years ago and that American chap, Max Tiddlehammer, took on Potions," Neville replied.  He paused to munch on baby carrots, looking thoughtful.  "Pity we lost him, but he wanted to travel, and then Beauxbatons offered him more money ....  Anyway, the last three teachers have all been on one-year contracts, and this latest one is due to have a baby right in the middle of the mock OWLs at Easter.  Which leaves it a bit late for us to find a replacement, so Snape could end up teaching the spring and summer terms anyway."

"I don't care what he says," Hermione put in from the other side of the table, "he's getting a little old to take classes _and_ manage the running of the school."

"Are you going to tell him that?" Ron asked, raising a brow at his wife.

"Shut up, you," she retorted, rapping his knuckles lightly with a serving spoon.  "I'm just _saying_."

"I know," he grimaced, rubbing his hand, "you often do ...."

Harry hastily intervened with a question about Hermione's job, and their side of the table lost interest in the conversation between Draco and Neville.

"You got a Potions NEWT, didn't you?" Neville asked Draco quietly.  "Have you considered teaching?"

Draco quickly got a grip on his exasperation before he could snap back at the other man.  He should have known it was stupid to raise Snape, Potions and teaching, but was everyone utterly blind? 

"No," he replied shortly.  "I'm not exactly considered an ideal role model for children."

Neville looked surprised.  "Really?  Snape was in the same position as you when Dumbledore hired him, and look at him now!"

"The cases are _not_ the same." 

Despite his best efforts that came out with a real bite, and Neville almost flinched.

"Well, I don't see why," he replied quietly, and he turned away to talk to Rosie instead.

Draco lost interest in the rest of his dinner.  Why had he agreed to come here anyway?  Anyone could see that it was a mistake.  Oh yes, he came because Harry wanted him to – well he must be going soft in the head to listen to that kind of crap.

Then he happened to glance up and see how happily Harry was chatting to his friends.  Somehow that made it worse, because no matter how little he was enjoying it, he didn't want to spoil things for Harry.  And he couldn't imagine why he was experiencing such an irrational impulse, because Harry would have enjoyed it just as much if he'd come on his own .... wouldn't he?

Hermione got up and started to gather the plates.  "Would someone give me a hand here, please, while I dish up the pudding?" she asked.  This was rather pointedly directed at Ron but, feeling stifled at the table, Draco volunteered first.

He saw her brows twitch up in surprise – actually, he saw several sets of brows go up around the table – but she merely thanked him and let him collect the rest of the plates and cutlery while she went off sort out the pudding.

"Haven't you had enough of serving today?" Harry teased him quietly, as he handed his plate over.

"Ha-bloody-ha," he retorted irritably, and just for the hell of it he dropped a soup spoon neatly down the neck of Harry's sweater, making him shout with indignant laughter.

For some unknown reason, that little exchange made Draco feel a lot better, and he toted the tableware into the kitchen with a much lighter heart.

 

*

 

It had been, Harry reflected, one of the best Christmases he'd had in several years.  There would be no going home after this one feeling cold and empty after an evening of fun.  Despite Draco's obvious misgivings, and a couple of sticky moments early on, it had been a success.

Two moments in particular stood out, the first being Hermione tossing Draco a large, squashy parcel from under the tree that turned out to be a blue Weasley jumper with a big "D" on the front (knitted by Hermione herself, although to one of Molly's patterns).  Draco's expression had been priceless.

The second had been Ron dragging out a large leather trunk and dumping it in front of Harry with a grin.  "Extra present," he said and gestured for Harry to open it.

Inside were the things that had been stolen from him, including Remus Lupin's spellbooks, his pocket watch and Sirius's spare wand.  And on the top was Harry's broomstick. 

He stuck his right hand out over it at once and said "Up!".  The elderly Firebolt, the very broom Sirius had given to him when he was thirteen, shot upwards and smacked into his palm with an odd little quiver.  Funny how he should feel so sentimental about this broom.  He had others, all later and faster models, but this one had a special place in his heart.  It had carried him in the final battle against Voldemort.

"Where did you find it all?" he heard Draco saying quietly to Ron.

"The pocket watch and wand were handed over by a second-hand dealer in Diagon Alley – I thought they might be.  The rest Snape found at Hogwarts – "

"Did you find the flying carpet?" asked Harry, looking up.

"That was at Hogwarts too," Dean put in.  "Actually, Snape said it was what led him to the culprits."

Harry's enquiring look was enough to get the rest of the story.

"They were caught trying to fly it from the top of the Astronomy Tower," Neville told him.  "Not by me, but Snape briefed all the staff about it the next day.  We had to do a House by House search for the rest of the things."  He grinned.  "I'm told they had problems getting the carpet to move at all – "

"I'm not surprised, that thing's about as sweet-tempered as a dragon with gastric flu," Ron commented.

"Apparently they knew they had to command it in Arabic, but they weren't sure of the exact words, so it kept zooming away from them."

There were a few chuckles at this, especially from Harry and Ron who exchanged knowing grins.

"It's more temperamental than this broom, and that's saying something."  The broom gave a funny little jolt, as though it knew what was being said about it, and Harry patted the handle soothingly.  "You talk to flying carpets like they're camels – not many people in Britain know that.  Mind you, it was quite handy in its own way.  Not as manoeuvrable as a broomstick, but you could roll it up and sling it around your back or wrap things up in it for carrying.  And it seated two adults without losing speed, which isn't the case with most brooms."

"Correction: It seated two adults if they were very good friends," Ron reminded him, and Harry laughed.

"So what have you done with it?" he asked.

Dean snorted and gave Ron a knowing look.  Ron was trying to look nonchalant. 

Harry raised a brow at him.  "You told me you were going to have to confiscate it."

"Well I have … sort of."

"Ron, what have you done with it?"

"It seems a pity to put it in the Evidence Store, especially since people keep poking their noses in there lately …."

"Ron …."

"It's under his desk in his office," Dean told Harry.

"Ron!"  That was Hermione, very shocked.

"It looks just like an ordinary rug there!" Ron protested.  "No one will ever know, and if we should need it again – "

"Oh, sure!" Bill chortled.  "People need flying carpets every day!"

"You never know – we might!"

Harry laughed until he was weak.  He hadn't forgotten the last wild flight he and Ron had on the carpet.  It had bucked them off mid-air above Phoenix Lodge, leaving the pair of them to scramble down off the roof, nursing numerous bruises.  To add insult to injury, when they got indoors the carpet was lying innocently in front of the fireplace, looking as smug as only an animated Turkish rug can.

"Don't you dare complain to me if one day it takes off with your desk still on top of it!" he warned.

So it had been a good Christmas all round, and when the time came to leave Harry felt quite cheerful as he followed Draco into the fireplace.

 

*

 

It was hard to say what he would have made of the conversation that followed his departure.

Ron closed the Floo after Harry and Draco, and turned to face the others.  There was a curiously expectant silence, then Bill said, "Is it me, or was I missing something there?"

Ron ignored him and looked enquiringly at Hermione.

She took a deep, relieved breath and let it out.  "He's looking _much_ better.  Isn't he?"

"Who?" Seamus asked, puzzled by the atmosphere.

"Harry," she replied, but she was still looking at Ron. 

"Malfoy too, for that matter," he commented, digging his hands into the pockets of his jeans.  "It was a bit odd when he first turned up at Harry's, especially the way he just kept backing away from confrontations, but he's more … _Malfoy_ now, for want of a better word."

"I don't know," Neville put in doubtfully.  "He wasn't mean to me once this evening, which was really unusual."

Ron grinned.

"It's not just the potion," Hermione said.  "I asked him, when he was helping me with the dishes.  Apparently they're giving it a break for a week or two, because if you take it for too long it can have some side-effects."

"What potion?" demanded a bewildered Seamus.

"Would someone care to explain what's going on?" Dennis Creevey asked.

"Sorry," Ron apologised.  "We're just concerned because Harry's had a few bad patches over the past year, and he really went downhill after those idiots broke into the Lodge.  It was a bit … worrying, but Malfoy took over looking after him, if you can believe that."  He gave his wife a rueful grin.  "And if he's going to be Harry's significant other, I suppose we should start calling him Draco."

"No!"  Seamus sounded genuinely shocked.  "You've got to be kidding me!  Harry's gay?  But I always thought he and Ginny – "

Ron and Bill both snorted.  "That's a story all by itself," Bill chuckled.

"Yeah, there _is_ a reason Mum and Ginny aren't with us this Christmas," Ron added. 

"That's enough!" Hermione said sharply.  "Harry wasn't very kind to Ginny and – "

"Not kind?  How kind did you want him to be?  And how obvious did it have to be for Ginny to notice that he wasn't interested?  Even if Harry wasn't gay, she must have realised after all these years that she didn't have a hope!"  Ron made an exasperated sound in his throat.  "Mind you, Harry should have been a bit blunter years ago, but when I think of all the times we've tried hinting to her and Mum – "

"I'm sorry, but can we backtrack a second?" Rosie Thomas broke in, looking at the two of them.  "What potion were you talking about?  And why is Harry taking it?"

"It's an antidepressant potion," Ron explained.  "He wouldn't go to a mediwizard about the depression because he was afraid of it getting leaked to the press, so Malfoy helped him make the stuff instead."

Seamus's eyes were starting to bug out.  "Malfoy is feeding Harry home-brewed potions and you're just sitting back and letting him?" he demanded, outraged.

"Wakey, wakey, Seamus," Dean said amiably.  "This is the new, improved Malfoy.  He actually took a bullet for Harry a couple of weeks ago."

"I didn't read anything about that in the _Daily Prophet_ ," Seamus retorted.

"What do you expect?" Dennis asked scornfully.  "The _Prophet_ 's nothing but a bunch of biased hacks these days.  Look at the coverage they gave the Montrose Magpies match the other day!"

"And they hire plonkers like Justin Finch-Fletchley," Ron added.

"Besides, Draco's taking the potion too," Hermione pointed out, "so it can't be dangerous – "

"What's he got to be depressed about?" muttered Seamus.

"Oh, nothing," Neville replied mildly.  "He just got tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail for handing his father over to Mad-Eye Moody.  Kind of thing that could happen to anyone, really."

Everyone looked at him.

"Steady on, Nev!" Ron said, grinning.

"If you can be Malfoy's personal cheerleader, then the least I can do is grab a pom-pom and join in," Neville said gravely.

"I wouldn't go that far ...."

"Could've fooled me," his brother said, amused.  "I wondered what was going on earlier, but now I'm beginning to think you're encouraging Malfoy."

Ron turned very slightly pink.

Seamus groaned.  "Please, _please_ , tell me you aren't actually encouraging him to put the moves on Harry!  For God's sake, if you have to set him up with someone, surely there are a dozen better candidates you could think of!"

"We're open to suggestions," Hermione said dryly.

There was a pause, and everyone was amused by Seamus's expression as he frantically tried to think of an alternative.

"Besides, I'm _not_ setting Harry up with Malfoy," Ron said firmly.  "Harry did that all by himself.  I just think, under the circumstances, I should try to be … supportive."

Dennis made a rude noise.  "Who are you and what have you done with the real Ron Weasley?"

"Come off it!" Ron protested indignantly.  "I didn't say I loved Malfoy.  But Harry's my friend and I owe it to him to try and tolerate the git!"

Bill was staring at his youngest brother thoughtfully, but just as it seemed he was about to say something, he changed his mind and sat back in his chair instead.

"Blimey ... a Malfoy in the family," he commented.  "Wait till I tell Fred!"

Hermione chuckled. 

Nuala, Seamus's fiancée, broke her silence by tugging on his elbow.  "We'd better invite him to the wedding," she said firmly.

 

*

 

"Fancy a mug of hot chocolate?" Draco asked, when the two of them stepped out of the Floo.  He dropped the parcel containing the Weasley jumper onto the sofa and stripped off his cloak.

"Okay."

The blond wizard nodded and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Harry to take his cloak off more slowly and light the tiny fairy-lights on the Christmas tree.  He considered lighting the main lamp for a moment, but changed his mind.  It was pleasant with the room illuminated by nothing but the winking tree lights, and he sat down on the sofa to watch them thoughtfully.

Draco reappeared a few moments later, bearing two steaming mugs.  "Here," he said quietly, and gave Harry his mug.  Then he moved his parcel out of the way and settled onto the sofa next to him,.  "What am I supposed to do with this?" he asked idly.  He put his mug down and took the jumper out of its paper.

"Wear it," Harry told him, amused. 

"You must be joking.  Only where no one can possibly see me, is that understood?"  He folded the jumper up again and put it to one side.  "I notice you didn't get one."

"No, but I already have a formidable stash from previous years.  I'll survive."

"You can have mine.  I wouldn't want you to feel deprived."

"No, that's okay.  Besides, it's the wrong initial."

"Excuses, excuses."

They sipped their hot chocolate in amicable silence for a while, then Draco set his empty mug on the coffee table with a sigh.  He sat back and looked at Harry.  "Can I ask you a personal question?"

Harry raised his brows.  "Of course."

"How do you feel?"

There was a pause, then Harry asked cautiously, "What do you mean?"

"Oh, you know – depressing festive season, a week without the potion, a whole evening with the disgustingly happy married couple ….  So how do you feel?"

Harry was quiet for while, considering the question.  "I'll admit I was a bit apprehensive about this evening," he said finally, "especially when you said last week that we should stop taking the potion for a while.  But mostly I've been okay.  And tonight was good.  Last year … last year was difficult.  I loved spending the time with Hermione and Ron, but when I came home afterwards the house felt so empty.  I miss having company in this place at Christmas more than any other time – I especially miss Sirius and Remus.  Sirius loved this house, but he only got to have one Christmas in it."

"I miss my mother at Christmas," Draco admitted.  He hesitated, then added, "It was this time of year when I tried to top myself.  It's pretty lowering to see everyone else having a big party when your life's going to hell in a handcart."

"I keep thinking back to the first Christmas after the war," Harry said.  "It felt like everyone was having a huge party, but it also felt so desperate because everyone had lost so much.  Ron's family – the gaps around the table were painful.  It just wasn't the same without Arthur, George and Percy, and I can't imagine how Molly kept going.  I think the last thing on earth any of us really wanted to do was celebrate Christmas, when less than a month before we were burying the dead.  So it sort of begs the question as to _why_ we feel so obligated to be festive when really there are years when it would be better just to quietly give it a miss."

"I don't know," Draco replied.  "I can't answer that."

There was another long pause, then Harry glanced sideways at Draco and gave him a quirky smile.  "I think I just succeeded in dragging the mood down after all."

Draco smiled.  "I'll survive it."  He stretched slightly and sat up.  "I don't know about you, but I'm going to bed."

"Me too."  Harry drained his mug and deposited it on the coffee table next to Draco's. 

"Are you going to put out the tree lights?"

Harry looked over at them.  "No … they're safe, I think I'll leave them."

He glanced into the study on his way to the stairs.  Fawkes and Hedwig were both roosting on their perches, heads tucked under wings, so he closed the door again quietly.

Draco was already heading into his own room when Harry reached the top of the stairs.  He hesitated, then put his head around the door.  "Are you sleeping with me tonight?"

Draco glanced around at him, surprised, then gave him an odd little smile.  "Are you making me an offer?"

 _Eh?_   Harry blinked at him for a moment, confused, then realised that what he'd said had been a little unusual … for him, anyway.  _Am I making him an offer?_ he wondered, surprised at himself.  _Perhaps it's time…._

"Could be," he returned cautiously.  _Harry Potter, you're such a romantic._

"Alright then."  Draco nodded, and he turned out the lamp on his bedside table.

"After all, it _is_ Christmas," Harry pointed out as he led the way to his room.  Then he felt like a bit of an idiot.

Fortunately Draco chuckled.  "Harry, if this is going to be just a once a year deal, then it had better be good!"

 

*

 

"Will you _stop_ fiddling with it?"

"Can't.  It feels like a tourniquet."

"That can be arranged.  Here, I'll do it …."   Draco slapped Harry's hands away from the cravat, and pulled it undone.  " _Honestly_ – how anyone as hamfisted as you ever became a Seeker is beyond me."




"Being a Seeker didn't involve tying complicated knots," Harry grumbled, but he lifted his chin obediently and let the other man re-tie the cravat for him.  " _Or_ trussing myself up like a Christmas turkey."

"Aren't you finished yet?"  That was Hermione, appearing in the door of the bedroom.  "Oh Harry, not re-tying your cravat _again_?  Really, you're as bad as Ron.  I had to threaten to hex his fingers if he didn't leave it alone."

"Now that's an idea."  Draco finished tying the length of grey silk and stepped back.  "There.  Touch it again and you'll be sorry."

"Just because you don't have to wear one …."  Harry glowered but followed Draco and Hermione out of the room. 

"Nobody forced you to be one of Seamus's ushers," Hermione reminded him as she negotiated the narrow hotel staircase.  In her sixth month of pregnancy she was making all manoeuvres with due care.  "If you and Ron don't stop complaining about the robes – "

"There's nothing wrong with the robes," Draco put in mildly.  "I don't see what the problem is."

The ushers were wearing black robes trimmed with silver over traditional morning suits of dark grey pinstriped trousers, silver-grey waistcoats, upstanding stiff white-collared shirts, and cravats.  The cravats were the source of most of the complaints, although Harry had taken a dislike to his dark grey top hat as well.  He complained that it made his hair stand on end; Draco was restrained enough to not point out that his hair did that anyway, without any help from the hat.

"It's not the _robes_ ," he muttered now, but he kept his voice low enough that the other two could pretend they hadn't heard. 

On the next landing they encountered Ron, who was waiting impatiently for them.  He had his top hat in one hand and the other was tapping restlessly on the banister rail, probably to keep himself from fidgeting with his own cravat.  Despite being fairly neutral colours, the combination of black, silver grey and a white shirt collar made his red hair and freckles stand out rather alarmingly. 

"Can we get a move on?" he demanded, annoyed.  "This collar's going to cut an ear off in a minute.  I'm going to strangle Seamus for making us wear this get-up."

"Nuala chose it, not Seamus," Hermione told him sharply.

"I'll strangle her then," was Ron's uncharitable retort.  "I've never felt such a prat ...."

"What – not even during the Fourth Year Yule Ball?" asked Draco.  He smiled blandly at Ron's expression.  "I'll treasure the memory of those formal robes of yours for the rest of my life," he added whimsically.

Harry gave him a sharp poke in the ribs.  "Stop it!"

"You spoil all my fun," Draco murmured.

"Not yet, but I can."

They all trooped into the hotel's bar, where a number of other guests were waiting. 

"Right then," Ron said gloomily.  "We'd better find Seamus and Dean."  Dean was the Best Man.  "Draco, are you making sure Hermione gets to the church safely?"

"I'm perfectly capable of getting there by myself," she told him crossly.

"There was a frost last night and the cobbles are slippery," her loving spouse replied flatly.  "Draco?"

"Yes, yes, I'll carry her if need be," the blond wizard sighed.  "Why can't we Apparate there?"

"Because Hermione can't Apparate while she's pregnant," Harry reminded him.

"Oh yes.  Silly me - I keep forgetting."

Since Hermione was carrying twins, it was nearly impossible to forget she was pregnant.  The robes she was wearing today were elegant and well-cut ... and utterly failed to hide her impressive girth.

Draco was unfazed by the sizzling glares directed at him by both Ron and Hermione, but strove to look properly chastened by Harry's reproachful gaze.  The warning glint in the green eyes seemed to suggest that his partner wasn't fooled.

"Behave," Harry told him sternly.

"Or what?  You'll eject me from the church?"

 _"Draco."_

There was an electric pause as two pairs of eyes, one green and the other grey, did silent battle.  Draco liked to think that he backed down graciously from this contest; life, after all, was so much more fun when he and Harry were on good terms, as he was the first person to admit.  All the same, it was a retreat and he knew it.

"Oh, all right.  I'll be good," he said, with a long-suffering sigh.

"You do it so well."  Harry gave his robes a final tug and with a resigned sigh he set his top hat on his head.  "Come on, Ron."

Ron muttered irritably, but put his own hat on and followed Harry out of the bar.

Bearing in mind his promise to behave, Draco turned to Hermione and asked civilly if she'd like a cup of tea before they started out.  She declined with a grimace.

"Better not.  There aren't any toilets in the church."

He winced.  That was more information than he needed.  "Well, you know best."

Hermione gave him an amused look.  "You're really not father material, are you, Draco?" 

She was thinking of an experimental visit he and Harry had made to the Burrow in February, after a truce had been struck between Harry and Ginny.  Fred and Angelina had been there with their three children, and the little ones, who would quite happily treat their Uncle Harry like a climbing frame, had been reduced to an alarmed silence by his new friend.  More amusingly, Draco had been equally uneasy around them.  He could handle teenagers without a second thought, but the tots might as well have been of an entirely different species. 

Draco shuddered fastidiously.  "Thank you, no.  I'll leave propagating wizardkind to those more inclined to the task."

She couldn't resist a gentle tease.  "Better hope Harry doesn't get broody, then."

He glared at her.  "If he does, he'll have to keep them in the greenhouse."

This kept Hermione silently chuckling all the way to the church.

The Church of St. Morag at Hogsmeade was a traditional little building of soft grey stone and, apart from several stained glass windows who occasionally moved around and joined in with the hymns, would not have looked out of place in most Muggle villages.  Draco collected hymnbooks and orders of service from Ron as they passed through the door, and escorted Hermione to a pew where Lavender Brown was already seated.  Correctly interpreting this lady's barely disguised look of dismay when she saw him, Draco took himself off to another pew with relief, where he sat by himself quite contentedly until an unexpected presence loomed at his side.

It was Professor Snape, resplendent in black velvet robes.  "If I may," he said, deep voice and dark eyes as enigmatic as ever.

"Of course."  Draco slid along the pew, making space for the headmaster.  "I wasn't expecting to see you here, Professor."

"I attend the weddings and funerals of all former members of the Order of the Phoenix," Snape replied calmly, taking his seat.  "I assume _you_ are here with Mr. Potter."

"He's one of the ushers," Draco said, before realising that Snape must have known this already.  He would have passed Harry at the door. 

"Indeed."  Snape raised a brow at his former pupil.  "He looks to be in reasonable spirits.  Am I to infer that the antidepressant potion was a success?"

"Yes.  Thank you."  After a moment, Draco added honestly, "For both of us, actually.  We're taking it every other day now, but we were considering taking a break from it soon and seeing if we can manage without it."

"I imagine that if Mr. Potter has sufficient distractions in his life, he'll manage quite well," was Snape's response.  "Inactivity, of both the body and the mind, is often the greatest enemy of those inclined to melancholia.  Mr. Potter is a man who requires occupation.  What of yourself?"

"I get bored very easily," Draco admitted.  "It's less of a problem now I live with Harry, but finding enough things to fill the day still isn't easy and I'm rather limited, as far as occupations are concerned.  And it's hard to find intellectual challenges."  He smiled wryly for a moment.  "That's not something I can get across to Harry very easily.  He's more of a doer than a thinker."

"As I recall only too well," the professor said dryly.  After a pause, he continued, "I believe Neville Longbottom may have mentioned to you the possibility of the Potion Master's position becoming vacant very shortly.  I've been unsuccessful in finding a replacement teacher for the summer term and am currently faced with having to teach the subject myself – a situation which will severely over-stretch me.  You are more than qualified for the position and, when you were not involved in internecine warfare with Mr. Potter during your lessons, you showed some indications of teaching ability.  It would seem to me that it would serve both our purposes if you were to take up the position as Potions Master."

Draco was silent.  Off-hand suggestions to this effect by Harry and Neville had been easily to brush off; a direct, unemotional statement by Professor Snape was another matter entirely.

"Mr. Longbottom informed me that you had reservations when he spoke to you at Christmas," Snape continued, when Draco seemed disinclined to reply.

"I hardly think the parents or board of governors would be pleased if you employed me," replied Draco, very quietly. 

"The parents and board of governors are faced with the possibility of their children being short-changed on the Potions syllabus if I don't find a suitable replacement teacher within the next three weeks," countered Snape.  "I'm under no illusions about myself, Mr. Malfoy.  When you were a boy, I might – _might_ – have been able to teach all of the Potions classes in a week and manage the school at the same time.  I cannot do so today, and attempting it could end in severe disruption of normal school operations.  Faced with that, I believe the board of governors and parents will listen to my recommendations."

Draco wasn't sure what to say in response to this, and while he was thinking about it, the vicar made his appearance and the congregation suddenly surged to its feet.

"We'll continue this discussion later," Snape told him in a tone that brooked no opposition.

 

*

 

"Chin up," Harry said quietly.  Draco had taken up residence on a sofa just outside the little hotel's function room, and appeared to be keeping himself to himself.  To Harry it looked like he was brooding, so he dangled a champagne flute in front of the blond wizard's nose.  "Go on.  One glass of this won't hurt, surely?"

"Or even two."  Draco accepted the glass and waited until Harry had seated himself at his side.  They touched glasses solemnly and sipped the sparkling wine.  "Not bad," he commented.  "Not that I can remember what really expensive champagne tastes like, but this one doesn't taste bad at all."

"I think Nuala's father imports it," Harry remarked.

"Lucky Finnigan," Draco replied lightly.

"Are you alright?" Harry asked him, studying his face quietly.  "Sorry I've been on the other side of the room for most of the day." 

During the wedding breakfast he'd been seated at the top table, of course.  Draco, on the other hand, had been stuck with a bunch of the bride's friends and relatives, none of whom had known quite how to deal with a reformed Death Eater in their midst.  _Two_ reformed Death Eaters, in fact, as Snape had been seated at the same table.

Draco gave him an amused look.  "Harry, I'm perfectly capable of looking after myself in social situations."

"I know, but you can't have much in common with Nuala's great aunts."

"No, but I had Snape to talk to as well.  I managed.  And at least I didn't get stuck with one of the bridesmaids all day."  There was the tiniest hint of a sly smile at this.

Harry looked wry.  "The less said about that, the better.  How is Snape?"

"He's on fine form."  Draco fiddled with his glass.

"Draco?"  Harry knew that look; Draco might have a face as opaque as carved alabaster to most people, but to Harry he was an open book.  Something was going on behind the silver grey eyes.

"He wants me to take up the Potion Master's job," Draco blurted out.

"Really?"  Harry wasn't very surprised.  He'd heard about Neville's suggestion at Christmas, and had judged it to be only a matter of time before the subject came up again.  "That's good, isn't it?"

"Is it?"  Draco took a swallow of his champagne.  He was looking anywhere but at Harry.  "If I accept – and I haven't given him any answer yet – I'd have to start within three weeks."

"Oh."  Harry _was_ a little surprised at that.  It seemed like a very short space of time to make a decision in – not that the decision was his to make. 

"And I'd have to live at Hogwarts."

He blinked.  "That goes without saying.  All the teachers live there, during term-time at least."

"You're not listening."  The blond wizard was beginning to sound angry, and Harry wondered briefly if the champagne had been a bad idea after all.  "I'd have to live at Hogwarts _for months at a time._   Not in Somerset.  At the other end of the country, in a place that has no access via Floo or Apparition."

Those fierce grey eyes were fixed on him, and suddenly realisation dawned.  Draco was hesitating over this decision because it would mean being away from Harry for long periods. 

Hard upon that realisation came a sudden rush of warmth and an odd tightness in his chest.

Later it would occur to Harry that this was probably _the_ defining moment in their relationship.  They might spend most of their waking and non-waking hours together, but this was the first time that either of them had admitted, even obliquely, that their relationship went beyond a mutual support base or even friendship-with-benefits.  It might have started out that way, but there was more to it now – they spent time together simply because they were happy in each other's company, because what had developed between them went deeper than friendship.  There was a connection.  They _needed_ each other.

And Draco had just admitted that.  He had as good as said that he didn't want to be separated from Harry.

To which, of course, there could be only one response ... although it took Harry a moment or two to say it, thanks to a ridiculous lump that had formed in his throat.

"I'll just have to get a house here in Hogsmeade, then, won't I?"

For once Draco was caught off guard.  He stared at Harry, stunned, and his jaw actually dropped open.

"Are you two ready to go, then?"

They both jumped like scalded cats, and Harry swore as he slopped the last of his champagne over his robes.  "Damn it, Ron!  You might give me some warning before you creep up like that!"

"How much warning do you need?" Ron demanded quizzically.  "It's not like you could miss me from where you're sitting!"

"I know, but – oh, never mind!"  Harry got to his feet, feeling very conscious of Draco as the other man stood up beside him.

Ron looked from one to the other of them and his brows went up slightly.  "Do I want to know why you look all googly-eyed and _he_ looks like he just saw the Minister doing the fandango in a grass skirt?"

Hermione appeared at his side and prodded him in the ribs.  "Don't ask questions you don't want to hear the answers to," she told him sternly.

"Yes, ma'am!"  He rolled his eyes.  "Come on – let's get moving before there's a sudden rush for the mirror portals.  I've already asked the hotel to send all our bags on ahead."

"You know, you two are welcome to stay the night with us," Hermione said quietly, as they all walked quietly down the darkening street.  "It would save an extra trip through the Floo tonight."

"That's kind," Draco said politely , before Harry could reply, "but I think we should go home.  We have some things to talk about." 

He gave Harry a significant glance which Hermione didn't miss – nor did she miss Harry's look in response but, despite her curiosity, she let it go.  After all, Harry reflected, a little amused, she knew him well enough to know that he would probably tell her – and Ron – in due course.

It wasn't until they arrived home at Phoenix Lodge that Draco said anything more.  And then it was with a look of deep uncertainty as he watched Harry go through the familiar motions of putting the kettle on the hob and finding the teabags.

"Harry, did you mean that?"

"Mean what?"  Harry put two bags into the little teapot, and put the caddy back in the cupboard.

"You know what I'm talking about."

"Buying a house in Hogsmeade?"  Harry turned to face him.  "Yes, I meant it.  Of course I did, you idiot!"

"But ...."  Draco fell silent.

"Why, would you prefer that I didn't?"

"No!  No.  I just ....  I didn't think – "

" - That I'd want to be close by?  Of _course_ I do!"  Harry looked at him for a moment, taking in Draco's confused expression, then he took a step forward and opened his arms.  "Come here a minute."

The hug was awkward at first; it wasn't something they did very often.  Then they both relaxed and Draco's grip on Harry suddenly became quite fierce, as though he'd just realised something important. 

"Of course I want to be nearby when you're working," Harry said into the neck of the other man's robes.  "Do you think I _want_ to be split up from you for three or four months at a time?"

"I don't know what I thought.  I didn't want to presume – "

"Well, start presuming.  I know you can when you want to!"  There was a chuckle in Harry's voice.

"Alright, then."  Draco pulled back slightly and looked at him.  "Since I'm finally going to get a job - do you want to share expenses in future?"

Harry was delighted.  He pulled away and opened one of the kitchen drawers, taking out a long brown envelope.  He untucked the flap and took out a handful of sheets of parchment – the contracts he'd drawn up with the agents when Draco first moved in.

He tossed them onto the stone flags and pointed his wand at them.  _"Locarnum inflammore!"_

And the tenancy contracts were reduced to ashes.

Harry turned back to Draco.  "Does that answer your question?"

"One of the them, yes."

"Oh?  What's the other?"

Draco raised a brow at him.  "Are you _ever_ going to tell me about the succubus?"

 **\- The End -**


End file.
